Safe Up Here With You
by dynamicsymmetry
Summary: On a return trip to Grady, Daryl and Aaron make a discovery Daryl never would have imagined and never would have wanted to: Beth survived. And doesn't believe she did. Of course Daryl believes he's the only one who can bring her back. And they can't go home until he does. - Bethyl, kinda; post-Coda. Much angst and other messed-up things.
1. in time this won't even matter

**Author's note:** You need to know a couple of things before we get started:

a) Stuff dealt with in here in very explicit terms will include depression, general mental illness, general violence, suicide attempts, suicidal thoughts, self-harm, traumatic brain injury, past sexual assault, and overall sexual uncomfortableness. This is not going to be a fun trip. This is going to get really upsetting. If you don't think you can handle the above, if you don't think you can stand a degree of relentless angst and authorial cruelty, if you want fluff of _any_ kind - and good God, I do not blame you - don't come in here, 'cause ain't none to be found. That said, for those of you concerned about the ending: You may know that I play irritatingly coy about endings, so I promise nothing. But I will say that if this _is_ a Rocks Fall Everyone Dies Everything Is Awful Forever thing, it'll be the first one I've ever written in this fandom. So.

b) I am Problematic in here. Like I said, I'm dealing with mental illness and traumatic brain injury, and I haven't done a tremendous amount of research, and I'm not being super careful about making sure all the effects and symptoms and implications line up. I own that. I'm bringing things in and tossing them around for the convenience of the story. Again: _hella problematic,_ and see the warnings above if you think you might find that too upsetting. In addition, what Daryl does in here? Yeah, it's a bad idea. It's a _monstrously bad idea._ I in no way intend to suggest that it's anything but a bad idea. I also don't intend to do a whole lot of direct engagement with the fact that it's such a bad idea, aside from general horribleness, so be aware of that as well.

Okay, I'll shut up. Here we go.

* * *

 **Chapter 1: in time this won't even matter**

Fifteen miles outside the Atlanta city limits is where they part ways.

It's uncomfortable. It was never going to _not_ be uncomfortable. Aaron stands awkwardly in that expressively awkward way only Aaron can stand, and looks from Daryl to Edwards and back again. They've talked about this, about what has to be done - about what _Daryl_ has decided has to be done - so there's no more discussion to be had at this point, but the potential for it is hovering in the air like smoke. And there is smoke. Daryl is smoking, because it's something to do with his hands - and because the nicotine is perversely soothing, stroking through his blood like soft little fingers.

Except thinking about it like that twists up his gut all over again.

It's a cloudy morning, threatening rain. Colder than it has been. He can't help but think this is appropriate - this and the black hulks of the burned-out suburban housing development they're in the middle of. Not many walkers here, for a wonder. They have time.

"You're sure about this." Aaron's gaze flicks past Daryl to the bike behind him. To what's already there, waiting. Waiting in silence. Silent since they left. "You..." His voice drops, as if he doesn't want Edwards to hear him, even though Edwards is standing right next to him. Edwards is fiddling with his own fingers and looking not only awkward but profoundly nervous. Edwards is not a fan of this idea. Edwards has a lot of misgivings, though he's voiced them only hesitantly.

Daryl has been wanting to break his nose since he properly met the guy. Never mind what he did. Never mind that he probably owes the man a debt he'll never be able to pay.

He ignores him. Nods at Aaron. Yes, he's sure - to the extent that he can be sure of anything right now. Which is difficult. The world was ripped out from under him once, then again, and now a third time, and he never would have expected it would happen like this. Never in a million years of wild imagination.

"I can't go back." He shakes his head. He's not going to look at the bike. He can't, right now. If he does he might not be able to talk. "Not like this. I can't... I can't do that. Not to them. Not to her." Maggie, he means Maggie, because she's been the center of the reasoning he's expressed, though he knows - and is sure Aaron suspects - that ultimately Maggie is an excuse. A cover for something far more selfish. "When I can. You tell her."

"Thanks for that, _friend._ " Aaron's smile is wan. But he'll do it. He's a good man. One of the few left. She was right, they do still exist, and it didn't take Daryl long to figure it out, and Aaron will do this for him because he understands.

He knows what it is to lose someone.

Find them again.

"I'll come back." He's said it before and he's saying it now, and it's meant as a promise but it sounds weak. He's not sure of anything and that includes everything he's saying. "I'll come back with her. Soon. You tell her that too. Alright?"

Aaron nods. Then, quietly, "You know she's probably never going to forgive you."

"She might get it." Might. But he doesn't really believe that. Maggie might forgive him, but she'll never _get_ it, because she wasn't _here,_ because she didn't have to look at this and decide. Didn't have to face what it meant. What has to be done.

Then again, she might not have had any more idea than he does. Maybe she'd get it after all.

"Take care of yourself." Aaron steps forward, reaches out, and Daryl takes his hand, clasps it. He _has_ been a friend. An unexpected one, but a friend all the same. Every one of his friends since the world fell apart has been unexpected, if it comes to that. He never saw them coming.

Never saw her coming. Never saw her coming either time.

"You too."

He glances toward Edwards and favors him with a single tiny nod. He can manage that. Maybe someday he'll even manage a _thank you._

That very much remains to be seen.

Hesitation, just for a moment. Then Aaron turns, lays a hand on Edwards's shoulder, begins to herd him toward the car.

Daryl watches them go. Watches them climb in, the car rumble to life, watches them circle around in the wide, shady intersection, watches them drive away. Thunder mutters in the distance and he tips his head back and stares up at that unfriendly sky, drops the cigarette onto the pavement and crushes it out with his heel.

He turns to the bike. She's there, sitting on it, and her flat, slightly blank gaze is fixed on him. She's utterly expressionless.

He sighs and looks briefly away. At the blackened carcass of a minivan. An equally blackened body, curled fetal in a final, lethal return to infancy. At the houses, all the houses, at how the two of them are surrounded by corpses of all kinds. In the distance, finally, he sees a couple of forms shambling toward them. They can't stay here, and not because of any physical danger. This place is bad for her. Every second they remain, he senses it pulling her further and further away from him.

She's already so far.

He manages to look at her again. Squares his shoulders. "Ready?"

Nothing. Then she nods - once, slow - and something that isn't at all relief but might someday be rushes into him. That much. She can do that much. Surely that's a good sign.

He's not in any way, shape, or form equipped to handle this.

He doesn't think anyone else would be. Doesn't think anyone else could.

"Alright." He closes the rest of the short distance to the bike and swings a leg over, settles in front of her. "Hold on."

 _Girl, please hold onto me._

Another moment of nothing. Then her arms wrap around his waist and they feel firm enough. He doesn't think she'll let go and fall.

Except she might. He knows that. This is a risk, and a huge one. It's all a risk now. Every minute with her is risking everything. She might release him and tumble and break her already broken head even further, and there won't be any getting her back this time. They don't get that many second chances. Third chances. Fourth.

She might release him because as far as she's concerned, she never got a second chance at all. As far as she's concerned, she might as well not even be here.

As far as she's concerned, she's dead.

He guns the engine, makes it roar. He wants to roar with it. Explode his pain and terror out through his throat. He doesn't know if he can do this. He doesn't have a choice.

He takes them out of there and devours the road.

She doesn't let go.

* * *

He fell when he saw her.

He completely collapsed. The legs disappeared from under him and he went down, knowing that Aaron was gaping at him and not caring. All he could see was her. He was sure he was insane, finally, that he had broken under the weight of everything like he had been so certain he would do for so fucking long. It was heavy, he had been doing his best to carry it, _trying,_ trying for _her,_ but he's just a man and there's only so much he can do, and maybe at last it was _too_ much. Being here, so close to where she died and where he said his horrible, abortive, mutilated _parody_ of a farewell.

He fell. Wanted to crawl toward her. If he was insane he didn't want to be well. He would accept this, _welcome_ it, because he was exhausted and he didn't want to try anymore, and she seemed so _real,_ when Edwards led her to them and he groped for her, her knees, and Christ, he wanted to kiss her feet.

No, she was real. He could touch her wounds. Doubting Thomas, he was. Even though he wanted to accept it without question - sane or insane. They stared at him as he touched her cheek, her brow, the last terrible one that took her away from him. All healed.

 _Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed._

But she stared at him too, uncomprehending. She didn't know him. Then she did, bit by bit; he watched it dawning in her eyes. But it was a gray morning, smothered in cloud. She shook her head. She pulled back a little. This man, dark and wild-eyed, unable to stop touching her now that he'd started. He could see himself, then. How she must see him.

He's not blessed.

And she wasn't healed.

* * *

It takes them about four hours. They hit the foothills and then the true mountains and they climb ever-upward, switchback after switchback, winding. The ground drops away into blue mist and the pines rise all around and fall beneath them, and it's beautiful. He never loved these mountains - they were his childhood hell - but he can see why people do.

It's a certain perversion that he's bringing her here.

 _I know a place. Came across it once. Big, high up. Isolated. Didn't see any walkers... If it's there, if it's the same… If there are any it's only a few. There's a well. Clean water. Not that far from a town, we can forage. I can hunt. We'll be alright._

 _It's beautiful up there. Mountains. Air's clear. She might... If she sees it. She went there on vacation a few times. She loved it, she told me._

 _It's as good a place as any, right?_

Right.

They climb and the sun peeks weakly through the clouds and sinks into mid-afternoon. Almost there. Through the town - it wasn't big, no more than a couple thousand people at most, and it existed primarily to serve vacationers. Like she must have been. There's a few stores and for the most part it looks untouched. It's in the middle of fucking nowhere, and he theorizes that most people packed up and headed toward Atlanta when word reached them about the refugee centers and the CDC working on a cure.

They pass through the center of it. He sees two walkers stumbling down a side road. Nothing else. He has a full pack of supplies - first aid, canned and dried food - so a trip back won't be immediately necessary, but it's good to know it probably won't be an ordeal when he finally has to do it.

Especially since he'll almost certainly be doing it alone.

She's a warm little weight against his back, and she has been the whole way. His fears haven't been realized. She didn't let herself fall. And he realizes, as they leave town, that he could have tied her to him but he didn't, and he didn't because he needs to trust her. He needs _her_ to understand that he trusts her, to the extent that she can understand it at all. He needs her to see that she can do this.

Like the walker in the clubhouse. She said she could take care of herself. She did.

He waited and watched, and let her find out.

They leave the town behind, below, and after another twenty minutes he can see it rising over them, its broad front clinging to a rocky crag and almost leaning precariously over it. Walled with huge panes of glass, and as they get nearer he notes that somehow none of them appear to be broken. Some rich fuck had himself a vacation house here, all in splendid isolation, and then the rich fuck left and probably died and never returned to it, so here it stands. Cold and shining, gleaming in the hazy sun.

She could fall from it. She could jump.

But he needs to trust her. So this is ridiculous, this is its own fun brand of insanity, and he knows it, knows that if she kills herself up here – _opts out –_ her blood will be entirely on his hands, but it's also a fact that if she's so far gone that she does that, finishes the job she started and turned away from on the farm, it won't matter, because in that case he never would have gotten her back anyway.

So he'll just follow her. It's not melodramatic. It's practical. The morbid convenience of it fills him with black amusement. He's thought about suicide many times since he carried her down those stairs. Each time, he turned away because she did.

They rise and rise, and as they do he becomes aware that she's holding him tighter, and very slowly the awareness begins to tear him apart inside. She's holding him - she doesn't want to fall.

At least not right now.

 _Thank you,_ he thinks, and it might be a prayer to her or to a god in whom he hasn't believed in a long time, or to the universe in general. _Thank you._ Because as that gleaming house gets nearer and nearer and the shaded road swoops in increasingly sharper curves, the bike leaning into them, he's actually believing. A little. He's actually finding some faith.

It might kill him.

It might kill them both.

* * *

He went from not believing it was true to wanting it to be true to - and this is horrible, he will never in a million years admit to this, he can barely admit it to himself - wishing it wasn't. Wishing she was dead after all. Because he _already_ lost her, he _already_ ground himself through that, and it might have been easier than gazing into those clear, blue, blank eyes. That flat gaze.

What he got back wasn't her. He looked at her and she wasn't there.

Then he saw that she _was_. It was like a tiny spark, way down in her void. Almost snuffed out. But he didn't think he was imagining it. He held her face in his hands and leaned close, and for a moment he didn't let her fight him off. He forced her, and it hurt to do it, he hated himself, but he had to know. He had to see.

She jerked free of him and stumbled back, and Aaron caught her and stared at him, eyes wide - clearly appalled.

Aaron doesn't know shit.

Except he does. He so does, and Daryl knew it, but he was spiteful and raw, bleeding out from the inside, and he didn't want sympathy. He didn't want understanding. He wanted not to be seeing what he was seeing, what he couldn't _un_ see.

 _I'm sorry. She's suffered massive trauma, we're not exactly equipped... I did my best._

Fucking Edwards. Fuck you, did you really? Did you love her that much? Did you try everything, did you break yourself trying, did you run all night until you literally couldn't stand? Did you despise yourself for it after, because you suspected that maybe if you tried, you just picked a fucking direction, you could have gone another half mile? Another mile? Two? More? That maybe there was another hour of it in you, hours if you dug deep, and you didn't really give her all you had? Would you have given everything, every part of yourself, to go back and get it right? Would you have handed over your legs, your arms, your nose and eyes and ears and tongue, your _dick,_ would you willingly have sent yourself into motionless silent darkness if it meant she came back whole and alive and _she fucking knew she was?_

Would you have done that, you worthless prick? Did you _really_ try?

Yes. He probably did.

She pulled away from him, turned, appeared to focus on Edwards. Reached up and - calmly, quietly, and with no apparent pain - began to claw at her own face.

Grabbing her wrists. Grabbing her hard enough that her bones ground together in his hands. She was bleeding. She wasn't doing it in half measures. She meant to score her flesh and she meant to do it as deeply as she could. Her struggling again, twisting in his grip, and all the time gazing up at him with that awful blankness.

What the fuck. Bellowing. What the fuck is _wrong with her._

Edwards, low. Trembling a little. Afraid, because he saw what happened to Dawn, and he was probably full of visions of his own death and didn't think it would necessarily be quick.

 _She doesn't believe she came back. She thinks she's dead._

 _She thinks she's a walker._

* * *

Except not all the time. That's the thing. She goes in and out. Most of the time she's quiet, calm. In fact, she's calm as a rule, but the good periods - which are the longest - aren't marked by those occasional bizarrely determined bouts of self-injury. They know she thinks she's a walker because she told them so, or so Edwards reported; she seemed confused about why they were trying to feed her strawberries, because she needed meat, fresh and raw and bleeding, ideally still screaming. She wasn't violent about it but she was adamant. She made it very clear.

She wouldn't eat the strawberries. They tried a few other things. Nothing worked.

After a few days - when she should have been and in fact _was_ perfectly capable of eating on her own - they restrained and force-fed her. She didn't sleep. She wouldn't stop screaming.

* * *

But she does have good days. This is a good day. He wasn't sure until she held him tighter, but now he knows, and when he pulls up the long drive - broad and stately, no doubt meant for the use of very expensive and preferably foreign cars - and the entire house comes into view with its other large windows and its multiple slanted roofs, its wide deck, its garden with a dry stone fountain and the careful landscaping almost entirely overgrown, he feels another clutch of hope.

He stops by the front door. Cuts the engine. Waits. She should let him go, let him get off the bike, get off herself, but she doesn't release him, and he doesn't try to make her. Because there's this, her arms around him - strong despite the degree to which her muscles atrophied - and he needs it. She does too, or that's what he's telling himself, but really he does. He can feel her chest expand and contract with her breath. She must be able to feel his. She _must._

 _I'm alive. So are you. We're the same._

Gradually her arms loosen and she shifts away.

She's already climbing off the bike as he is, and as he turns to get the pack and unstrap the bow, she walks forward, her gaze swinging everywhere. The trees all around the house, the house itself. The sun has well and truly emerged now, though it's still haloed in haze, and it catches her hair. Lights it up gold. In the hospital they had to shave it all off when they operated on her - _little bald Beth,_ he can't decide what the fuck to do with that image - but it's grown out some and it's long enough to hang around her face, long enough to almost cover the nape of her neck. Even if it wasn't for the scars he would be reminded of what happened to her every second he looks at her, but she's still crowned in soft gold and it still makes him ache, and he stands with the bow over his shoulder and the pack over the other and watches her, his breath a cold knot in his throat.

He catches a glimpse of her face. She's focused, and she looks mildly interested in everything she's seeing.

 _Interested._ Shit. Yes.

He clears his throat, and he has a flash of the back of her all lit rich gold by candlelight, drawing that music out of the old piano with her clever hands. Standing there and watching her while something happened inside him that he couldn't hope to explain and still can't.

She glances back at him.

"'s nice," he says, and he sounds so fucking stupid. "Right?"

No answer. Not that he expected one. She does talk but at highly irregular intervals, and it's almost impossible to predict what will get a response out of her. If she says anything at all to him it's a gift.

She looks interested. For now he can be satisfied with that.

"Alright. C'mon." He joins her, walks past her, looks back to make sure she's following. She is, though he knows that it's almost certainly half reflex and not that she actively wants to come with him.

She follows people. She follows them because they're meat.

The double doors are unlocked. He unshoulders the bow and pushes one open, touches her arm, guides her gently inside.

* * *

It's big. It's bigger than they need.

He stands in the foyer, looking up at the high cathedral ceiling, and he feels like he's walked them into an actual cathedral. Their footsteps echo. Everything is sleek and shiny chrome and light wood and white walls and very modern. The furniture is sparse and it doesn't look like it was made primarily with comfort in mind. There's almost no art on the walls, few decorations of any kind, and what's there is colorless and abstract in a way he finds vaguely disturbing. It feels cold, distant, unlived-in, and as he moves slowly forward toward the cavernous central kitchen/dining room/living room, which is walled in that glass for reasons of scenic appreciation, he feels - with a sickening lurch - as though he's walking into her mind.

Angles. Lines. Clean. Blank. Pristine in a horrible way. Fixed in a calm and deadly logic. She's calculating. She's highly rational in the most irrational way possible. She's completely insane, and he was insane for wanting to come up here with her.

He tells her to stay put, rapidly checks the whole place. It's clear. Not only no walkers but no bodies of any kind. Thin, undisturbed layer of dust everywhere. No sign that anyone's been up here in forever.

It feels like a clean, bright mausoleum.

He returns to the foyer with the bow over his shoulder. He has to pretend to be something resembling enthusiastic. He has to do it for her. He turns back to her and he takes her hand, and she doesn't try to pull away from him. She looks down at their fingers, brow slightly furrowed... And she folds them together. She threads them.

He almost bursts into tears.

She looks back up at him, brows still knitted together. Puzzled.

"Where are we?"

He swallows. She's talking. She's holding his hand, she's _aware_ that she's holding his hand, and she's talking to him. This is better than he hoped it would be, so much faster than he expected - because is it? Is this good and traceable to what he's done? Is this place helping her, and already? Was he right? Did he somehow actually _get it right?_

"We're in the mountains. Remember? I told you I was takin' you up here. 'cause you need..." He looks down at their hands, at the floor, at the wall. He can't look at her. Just for a few seconds, he needs to pull himself together. When he first broke in front of her back in Atlanta it upset her deeply and if he does it again he has no idea what it'll do. "You need to rest."

"Oh." She takes a breath, frowning harder, and tugs her hand free from his. She does it carefully, with clear conscious intent, and he doesn't try to stop her. He's determined that if she's not actually attempting to hurt herself or him, he's not going to try to stop her from doing anything, and neither is he going to force her.

She walks away, into the big room, the impacts of her boots on the hardwood ringing off the bare walls. He hangs back and follows her slow progress, and he shivers when she runs her hand along the back of a long, low sofa, a built-in bookcase full of black glass sculptures and vintage hardbacks, the stone mantle of the enormous fireplace, a chrome standing lamp. She's engaging. She's _there._ He wasn't wrong. He did see something and it wasn't his imagination, wasn't wishful thinking. She's in there, somewhere, and maybe she's not complete, maybe she's in pieces, but he can find her, help her find herself, reassemble and stitch and glue and put herself back together again.

He can do this. He can have a little faith.

She reaches the wall of glass and lays her hands flat against it. Tilts her head back and looks up, scans the entire thing. Like she's mapping it. Committing it to memory. He picks that moment to follow her, though he keeps his distance, keeps himself to the center of the room - by the sofa and an ugly iron and glass coffee table that looks like it might have cost a few thousand dollars.

"Beth?"

She turns. Looks at him. Licks her lips. His heart is pounding into his throat.

"Who are you?"

He can't help it. It's not breaking, he tells himself. It's not loud or violent. She might not even be processing what he's doing, might have no idea how to read his face. She has a hard time with faces now. Maybe that's a good thing.

He goes to the sofa and drops the pack, drops the bow, sinks down onto it and buries his face in his hands.

* * *

She does eat. Now, she does. It's hard to say if it's a sign of her coming back, but not too long after they had to force feed her, it was like a switch flipped in her head and she understood that she could eat normal food, and she was quite willing to do so. She insisted that it wasn't what she really _needed,_ but she ate and she didn't get into any fights with anyone about it.

She ate mechanically. There was no sign that she enjoyed anything, disliked anything, tasted anything at all. But she ate, and she didn't starve and they didn't have to fuck around with IVs or feeding tubes anymore, and that was more than enough to consider progress.

Or so Edwards said.

He packed candles but it turns out there's a drawer full of them and a lot of them scattered around - part of those cold, weird decorations - and he gathers some of them together on the short, blocky dining table, and as the sun goes down he lights them and sets out dinner. It's just beef jerky and cans of peaches and cranberry sauce and a package of Oreos, nothing fancy and frankly pretty weird, though they're more than used to throwing together weird food combinations by now. Depending on what he finds in town they can maybe put together something better, but for now this is at least food and there's plenty of it. Maybe he should be rationing more, but this is their first night here, and he's so fucking stupid for wanting to do this and it feels so pointless and he doesn't know why he's giving in to this impulse, but it could be a sad little party.

Sad little white trash brunch. He'll actually do it, if he can. If the town has them. He'll get some peanut butter and jelly, soda, he'll even try to get his hands on some pig's feet, because that's something she knows and maybe she'll taste it and remember.

He didn't expect to feel so pathetic every second he's doing this.

She's lying on the sofa. She's not sleeping. Her eyes are open, and she's not blinking as much as she probably would under normal circumstances. But she's not blank. She's watching him. She's been watching him all afternoon as he moves around, makes sure the house is clear, makes sure there's still running water, gets together what supplies he can find. There are bedrooms, three of them, and they're big. He wasn't sure whether or not they should use them, whether she should sleep alone, but the idea of a bed is very attractive. Especially these, which are very soft, and the sheets on them are a bit musty but softer and silkier than any he's ever slept on in his life. Like the rest of the stuff here, expensive. What is it about sheets? The thread count or some shit? Something like that. It must be ridiculous.

In the end he dragged two of the mattresses into the main room, kicked aside a table and a couple of chairs to clear some floor. They aren't together - they are, in fact, on opposite ends of the room with hers near the window, because he feels like she should have at least a _little_ space to herself - but he'll be with her. He'll be able to keep an eye on her. It might not make any difference, but he'll feel better.

He doesn't trust her. He can't. Not totally. Not yet.

There's another pack on the bike. He didn't let her see him filling it. He'll bring it in later, and he'll do it when he's sure he can hide it well. There are things in it he doesn't want to ever have to use.

There are syringes and a couple bottles of sedative, which Edwards has showed him how to administer. There are pills to do the same job, only milder and slower and less potentially dangerous. There are cobbled-together versions of the restraints the hospital uses.

There's a length of rope.

There's a gun.

He agonized over that last. If she found it. If she decided to use it. On herself. On him. But then he thought about the cliff and about jumping, and he figured the same logic applied. If she wants to do it, if she's really determined, it doesn't matter what the fuck he does.

She'll find a way.

She's been watching him as he tries to get things settled. Watching him put the sheets back on the mattresses, find blankets. It's only early autumn and still warm, but it does get chilly up here. Watching him arrange things in some kind of order. Watching him.

He doesn't like the way she's watching him. But unless she tries something, there's nothing he can do about it.

He finishes, turns to her. "C'mon over."

She doesn't move. Watches him. Blinks.

He sighs. Everything in him is very heavy. "Beth, c'mon. You gotta eat." He jerks his chin at the plate - there are plates and he's going to use them, he's going to make this as civilized as possible. "We got cranberry sauce, you love that. It's the jelly kind, y'know. With the ribs from the can."

She does. She did. She did love it. They came upon some once and he got to see it for himself.

She doesn't move.

"Beth," he murmurs again, and he starts toward her.

He's less than five feet from her when she gets up, startlingly fast, every muscle tense, legs slightly spread and center of gravity low. Her face is impassive but everything about her body screams _fight or flight_ and he freezes, almost falls back, because she's dangerous. He knows she is.

God, he doesn't want to have to actually find out how much.

But again, she doesn't move. She's just _there,_ and then, bit by bit, she relaxes. Whatever she saw, whatever got her up like that, it's gone.

Or she doesn't care about it anymore.

"Daryl," she says softly, and there's nothing else, but she knows him again. She at least knows him in the vague way in which she slowly came to recognize him, which he'll gladly accept in lieu of that hideously total lack of any recognition at all.

"Yeah. Yeah, that's right." He steps toward her, reaches for her, and she allows him to take her elbow and when he tugs she moves unhesitatingly. Placid. Calm as a cow.

 _God._

He leads her to the table and she sits down and eats on her own, without any prompting. She eats and she eats everything in front of her, but she eats in that same automatic way, as if she's refueling a machine, and when she's done she doesn't comment on any of it or ask for any more. She simply stares down at her plate, once again with that faintly puzzled expression.

If it comes to that, he eats in much the same way. He tastes nothing. He eats because he has to be strong. For her. He doesn't take his eyes off her the entire time.

It's something. He has to keep thinking like that. It's something.

* * *

There's a woodpile outside and he gets a fire going - big and bright and throwing odd shadows around the room. It's already cooling down a good bit and he guides her over to it and sits her down on the floor in front of it, gets her a blanket and puts it over her legs. She doesn't seem aware of it - or she doesn't seem to have any opinion about it - but she doesn't resist him, and again he counts that as something.

He sits down next to her, crosslegged. Not too close. But close enough for her to feel him.

There's a long period of nothing but the crackle of the fire. Then he takes a breath and drags himself together, _wrenches,_ and forces some words out of his useless fucking mouth.

"You sang by the fire. Remember? Used to do it a lot."

Nothing. But he didn't expect anything. He pushes on.

"At the prison, first night we were there. With everyone. We cleared out the walkers. That was..." He trails off for a second, chewing at the inside of his cheek. Biting until he tastes copper. "That was a good night. You were smilin', everyone was. You'n Maggie, you sang together. You remember that?"

Nothing. Except- The corner of her mouth twitches. Maybe. It might have done. The corner of her mouth, and then her hand - he's not imagining that - settling over the blanket, drawing it up a little higher. Not reflex, not unconscious and meaningless motions to go through. She's pulling it up because she wants to.

"You remember what you sang?" His hands are shaking. This is awful. "C'mon, you gotta remember. What did you sing?"

He falls silent. He can't push anymore. He knows he should wait, give her a chance, but he also almost can't bear to. It took everything out of him to say what he said, to remember it himself. That night, watching her by the fire, lit up like she is now, so beautiful, and listening to her and that was beautiful too and it hurt, and he didn't understand why. Still doesn't. Not completely.

He didn't...

She looks at him. Looks right at him. Focuses. Licks her lips and parts them.

 _Yes. Yes, girl, c'mon. Try. Try for me._

She looks away. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't look at him again.

At some point he gives up and puts her to bed. He tucks her in like a child. And he feels like maybe he shouldn't, like it's wrong somehow, like it's stepping across some kind of line, but before he leaves her he strokes her hair back from her face, and allows his hand to linger. Her hair is soft. She's soft. Still, even now, even when her eyes are so hard. Soft and warm, and alive.

He does break then. It's quiet. She probably doesn't notice. She doesn't _seem_ to notice when he leans down and presses his lips to her temple, lingers there too. She smells fresh, clean. Bright. She smells like the color of her hair.

 _Goodnight. Goodnight, girl._

 _We'll try again tomorrow._


	2. this chapter will be long on the grass

**Chapter 2: this chapter will be long on the grass**

He used to have nightmares like this, is another thing. Used to have them frequently, jumbled in with the others where his dad is a walker and pursuing him for miles and miles of trackless road, hair patchy as mange and face half sloughed off and tongue lolling through a broken jaw, and with the ones where he wakes up and Merle is lying next to him, reeking of blood and torn gut with his skull a churned, stabbed-in horror, and when he raises his head Merle grins at him and grates _Finally found ol' Merle, didn't you, baby brother? Finally came after ol' Merle and finished the job for that asshole whose dick you been suckin' this whole time._

In those nightmares she was there and she didn't know him. Didn't know anything. She wasn't dead but she might as well have been a walker, plodding through the world with her head slightly cocked like a brain-damaged bird.

Brain-damaged. She is. He's not a doctor. This is such a mistake. Should have left her with Edwards, gone off by himself if he couldn't bear it. Not this.

He goes to his mattress and pulls off his boots, shirt, and he lies on his side for a long time and looks at her as the rise and fall of her body slows and deepens into sleep. He put her by the window because he thought the light might be good for her, and the moon is high and waxing and bright and it spills all over her. Her skin is far from perfect, scarred now in more than just the four places, but in that light she looks like marble. Like ivory. Something bloodless and carved.

She's alive and she's real, and she's sleeping, which means she'll get stronger. She'll be stronger tomorrow. Tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow they'll try again.

He's not giving up on her. Not this time. He'll die first.

If he can't save her now, a significant part of him feels like that might be exactly what he deserves.

* * *

He put her by the light but she's not the only one getting it; the place has a southeastern exposure and the sun floods into the room as soon as it crests the horizon, drowning everything. It slams against his closed eyelids and wrenches them open, only to shove them closed again when screwdrivers stab into his retinas. He winces and rolls away and wishes he had either put the two of them elsewhere or invested in some kind of blinds.

Except no. Not here. Not this window. It's too big, it's too high, and when he does manage to open his eyes and peer groggily around him, sitting up with his legs tangled in the sheets and a hand raised to shade his face, he sees her there in front of it just like the previous afternoon, her palms flat against the glass, a little dark form against the brilliance.

The deck wraps around but here there's nothing but a sheer drop, and he has a sudden, horrifically vivid fantasy of her backing up and stancing like an Olympic sprinter, launching herself forward and arcing gracefully through the glass and out into the morning in a beautiful cloud of glittering shards.

He wouldn't be able to stop her. Not at this distance. He would never get to her in time.

Maybe he's making more mistakes. Maybe everything is a mistake. Maybe it's impossible to do _anything_ here that isn't basically a huge mistake.

But she stands there with her hands against the glass and she doesn't back up, doesn't leap. She doesn't do anything. She's just _there,_ dressed as he left her in a loose t-shirt and boxer shorts that don't entirely fit her and hang a bit off her hips, and she looks so small. So young. It's impossible that she's been through all of this, young as she is. Impossible to go through it and still be standing at all.

She's so strong.

"Beth," he calls softly, and she turns, and for a fraction of a second - but long enough that he's _certain_ he saw it - a smile is pulling at the corners of her mouth. Barely there, but that slight curve. He's seen it before. It's her.

Then it's gone. Except not entirely. It left something behind. That spark in her, brighter. He can see its glow from all the way across the room.

He clears his throat, nudging hair out of his eyes. "You wanna eat?"

She nods, and he gets up and starts to pull breakfast together.

* * *

Once again she eats in that mindless, mechanical way, but once again she _is_ eating, and she's doing it without arguing or fighting him, and she's doing it all by herself. He watches her but he tries to be less obtrusive about it, even though he's still pretty sure she wouldn't and doesn't care.

He has to talk to her. He sucks at talking, and that includes talking to her. With her it's easier than it is with most other people, or it _was_ \- though he was starting to be able to talk at least a bit to Aaron - but he still sucks at it, and now he has the strongly distinct impression that whatever brings her back in the end, communication is going to be a significant part of it, so he has to suck it up and try.

"Gonna head to town tomorrow. You think you can come with me?" It's dangerous to leave her here but he hadn't planned on taking her and he still doesn't, because _everything_ is differing degrees of dangerous and all that's left to him is semi-effective risk management. But he figures it doesn't hurt to at least float the idea and see if she grabs it and holds on. And in fact she _is_ looking up at him, that same expression of mild consternation, that same sense of something gnawing at her.

"Could use someone to watch my back. It don't look too bad down there, but." He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. Crumbs, sticky, not all of the former confined to the plate because he will never be a tidy eater. Canned yams and crackers. The former aren't so terrible eaten cold. "You probably remember how to handle a gun. You're good with it. I'd feel better." He stops, searching her face. None of this is a lie. He doesn't think he can take her with him, but holy fucking _Christ,_ he wants to. The two of them together. Like it was. He trusted her with his life. He wants to do that again.

And - very slowly - she nods.

He has no idea what to do. Part of him should have anticipated this, should at least have prepared a plan for it, because what the fuck is he supposed to do now? Tell her he changed his mind? Tell her he never meant it, never thought she would respond at _all_ let alone say yes? Letting her, taking her, putting a gun in her hands - can he _do_ that?

He absolutely can't.

"Beth," he whispers, but then she looks over toward the door and something happens to her face. Something he's seen before. A deeper flatness. A grayness. A fog settling around and enveloping her into its chilled, wet heart.

Her hands are hooking into claws. Trying to dig into the smooth, glossy wood of the tabletop.

"You should leave me down there," she says softly. "Why did you bring me here? I don't belong here. I have to be down there. With them. I have to eat."

He can barely speak. _Girl, no._ "You're eatin' right now."

"This?" She turns her attention back to the plate. She's still calm, still flat, but there's an edge of vague scorn in her tone. "This isn't food. This is... I dunno what this is. I don't know why none of you people believe me. _Look_ at me." Now her attention shifts up to him, her eyes meeting his, wide glassy blue devouring her face like her oversized t-shirt is devouring her body. "I _felt_ it. I'm not here. You don't see it 'cause you don't _wanna_ see, but that doesn't make it less true."

"You're a walker?"

She nods. Somehow he's found a way, in the last few moments, to make himself cold. Cold and hard as the chrome that covers the entire kitchen. He'll have to do this. He'll have to do it a lot. He should get comfortable with it.

"You got shot in the fuckin' head, Beth." Keeping his voice level. Careful. He's not going to yell. "If you're a walker, and you got shot in the fuckin' head, why're you still around?"

She doesn't answer him. Her expression doesn't change. She doesn't budge her gaze. He doesn't budge his. It's a standoff. That's exactly what it is. He's staring her down and she's trying to do the same. Somehow he never really understood that he would be fighting her. Not just fighting _for_ her, but _her._ He's probably not going to be able to do this peacefully. He's probably going to have to beat her down.

He's probably going to have to break her.

Finally she looks away again. Her nails are still digging into the wood, her knuckles bone-pale. Abruptly she thrusts the plate across the table and gets up with a sharp jerk, kicking her chair back and turning from him. Her back is expressing everything she needs to say and isn't.

She's angry. She's angry and that's so good, because she's not _numb_. There's fire.

"You're stupid," she says. "You're stupid and blind and you'll see."

She stalks away from him, heading across the expanse of floor toward the short flight of stairs that leads up to the other rooms. He doesn't take his eyes off her: her lifted head. Her purposeful gait. Her hands clenched at her sides. Her outside the shack, not backing down. Not budging. Not afraid of him. Solid in what she knew. She was burning bright then and she was so alive and she threw him into awe of her.

She held herself like this. Like she is now. Arguing that she's dead. It doesn't matter.

Inside he's rejoicing.

* * *

He follows her after a while.

Not hurrying. He refuses to hurry. He refuses to panic. He let her have some time. Maybe he shouldn't leave her alone, no, but maybe she also _needs_ to be alone. She hasn't been alone for a single waking moment since she woke up that first terrible time. She's so far away from herself. He's not sure that being constantly in the company of other people is necessarily going to help her find her way back.

So he goes through the kitchen cabinets again, even though he's been through them already. There's a pantry - it's not very well stocked but there's stuff and a lot of it is non-perishable, and there's a wall of wine bottles. Floor-to-ceiling rack. He saw them the day before but he didn't take any time to really _look_ at them, and he pulls a few of them down.

He knows nothing whatsoever about wine. He knows that it can make you drunk. He knows it's not his first choice in terms of methods of getting drunk. He knows that it - also - can be ridiculously expensive. Or it could, when _expensive_ still meant shit.

He puts the bottles away. The last time they drank together, it didn't end so well. Probably best to not try it again.

He goes back into the kitchen and he stops for a few seconds, head cocked, listening. No sound at all from upstairs.

He turns to the block of knives on the counter and removes them all. He goes back into the pantry and pushes them under the wine rack, far back enough that they won't be visible unless someone really gets down there and looks. This feels like a pointless exercise - they're on a _cliff_ for fuck's sake and it's really true that all she has to do is make a determined run for the window, and even if she doesn't do that there are probably any number of other ways to hurt herself in here, and Christ, he's seen for himself that all she needs are her own fingernails - but he does it anyway.

He's not a shrink. He's never been to a shrink. He has no desire whatsoever to go to a shrink, if one were even available. But he recognizes this as a coping mechanism. An attempt to exert control over an environment and a situation where he really has almost no control at all.

He goes out to the bike and he gets the other pack. He considers it for a moment, standing in the echoing foyer, then takes it to the pantry and stuffs it at the far end of the wine rack from the door, in the gap between it and the back wall. It's not very accessible, and if he needs it in a hurry - which is kind of why he has it at all - it's going to be a problem, but he can't have it out there. He just can't. What it means. What it's for.

He can't.

So he finishes this, and then he goes back out to the main room and he pulls his bed into some kind of order, does the same for hers - for fuck's sweet sake, he's never made a bed in his _life_ \- and he goes to the stairs and after another few seconds of listening he goes up.

The bedrooms and the two bathrooms here make up the other half of the house, all spacious, all the same kind of cold and angular and distant. All high ceilings, big windows, very sparse decoration. She's not in the first bedroom he enters - naked boxspring, more hardwood, walk-in closet standing open with not much in it but a couple of plastic-sheathed suits that don't look like they've been touched since before the Turn and a bunch of unlabeled boxes he doesn't care to rifle through. The second one is almost identical except for a very large and deeply strange painting over the bedframe - a long streak of black on a white background, haloed in splatters. The center of it looks like a spilled pool of something. When he first saw it he looked at it long enough to be sure he hated it, and he hates it now, and he gets out of there as fast as he can.

She's in the third bedroom.

It's smaller. He didn't pull the mattress from it because it's at the very back of the house and he didn't want to make the trip that far down the hallway if there were two others closer by. Somehow, though the windows are also smaller, it seems brighter - perhaps because the light doesn't have to travel so far to hit the walls and bounce around. The bed is a full rather than a queen, there's another abstract painting that looks like it might be by the same artist, except it's white and green and he doesn't hate it nearly as much. There's another built-in bookcase with more hardbacks - though these are clearly far less about a display of _oh-I-am-so-fucking-cultured-as-well-as-extremely-rich_ \- and she's sitting on the floor in front of it, her legs folded to the side, bent over something in her lap.

He moves up behind her, quiet but not stealthy. He wants her to know he's there. If she _can_ know. She doesn't turn or look up, but there's a subtle shift in the angle of her head and the set of her shoulders that tells him she's almost definitely aware of him.

He drops into a crouch and shifts a little beside her. "Whatcha got?"

Slowly, she swings her head around and focuses on him. The light catches her face and he sees - like the first time - the cruel scars slashed across her cheek and brow, and the tiny star-crater up by her hairline. And the healing scabs on her cheek where she clawed her skin open. Another scab at the corner of her bottom lip where she bit herself to taste the blood. Her eyes are so big and blue, and for the moment he knows they _see_ him, and his chests twists into a hot bloody fist because she's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen, because she's _here_.

He rips his gaze away from her and drops it down to what she's holding in her lap.

It's a book, clearly old - pages in good condition but gently yellowed and the cloth edges of the cover slightly frayed - and he can't make out the actual text, but he can see the title in the top left hand corner of the page.

 _The Secret Garden_

"You ever read it before?"

He never has. He knows it exists but he knows nothing about it other than the fact that presumably there's a garden in it, and he's never so much as touched a copy.

She nods. Her attention is still fixed on him and he's pleading her silently and wildly to keep it there.

"When you were a kid?"

She nods.

"You like it?" He's flailing. He has to say something to her but he's a roiling bag of panic. He thought it used to be hard to say things to her when it felt like there was a lot at stake, that he couldn't fuck up again and hurt her somehow, but now he doubts anything he could say could really _hurt_ her in that way, and yet talking to her is next to impossible.

She doesn't respond at all – not at first – and her eyes slide just a bit out of focus, and he's thinking he might have lost her again when she speaks.

"Daddy read it to me."

Okay. All right. Daddy. He can work with this. He lowers himself the rest of the way to the floor, sits next to her, angles himself so he's facing her. "How old were you?"

"I was..." She frowns. Her eyes are distant again but not because she's slipping out of the world. She's trying to remember. "I was eight. Seven or eight. Mama too, they... They took turns. They were takin' turns gettin' me to bed. But Daddy did the voices so I liked him best." And she punches him in the fucking jaw when she gives him a smile - small and warm and so sweet - and leans forward a bit, suddenly conspiratorial. "I never told anyone. Didn't want Mama... Didn't wanna hurt her feelings. I didn't have favorites. Didn't do that. But I did. With that." She looks down at the book again. "Daddy did the voices," she repeats, and it's so soft that he knows she's not talking to him anymore.

This is something. This is a sacred moment. This is the opening of a door, wider and clearer than any since he first set eyes on her after Grady, and he has to walk up to it, and if he's very, very careful he might be allowed to walk through.

He reaches up and lays a hand on her shoulder - light as he can - and he feels the bones under her shirt, so delicate even if she was never fragile, and a minute shiver rolls through her but she doesn't flinch. She doesn't pull away.

"Can you read me somethin'?" He nods down at the pages. "Anythin' from that part. I never read it, just... read me a bit of it. Can you do that?"

 _Please._

"I..." She shakes her head, but he doesn't think she's actually refusing him. The way she's hunched herself, the way she's not quite meeting his eyes, it feels so much more like she's simply uncertain. Uncomfortable. And he hates making her uncomfortable.

He needs to get used to it, and he needs to do so immediately.

"Beth, can you?" Something in him tenses. Once again this feels strangely like tweaking some unseen and undefined line. "For me?"

She rolls her shoulder beneath his hand. Purses her lips. Reaches up and pushes a few strands of hair back from her face. And the movements are so quintessentially _Beth_ that for a few seconds he can't breathe.

She reads.

 _One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands out and throws one's head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one's heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun—which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so._

She pulls in a soft breath.

 _And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with the millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in someone's eyes._

She falls silent and merely sits, motionless, staring down at the book. And he has no fucking idea now - and never will even if he really _does_ live forever and ever and ever - what to possibly ever say.

And she looks up at him, puzzled. That same puzzlement. That same confusion.

"Where's Daddy?" Another punch in the jaw, this one he doesn't see coming and really should have because no one gets to have anything good, and inside he reels back and before he can recover she's pushing on. "Daddy should be here. Daddy's dead, the Governor..." Suddenly her lip trembles and her eyes are bright, too bright, and his entire body is numb from the neck down. "I should be with Daddy. He should be here. Did something happen? He always said he would be. We would all be together. In Heaven. Daryl, he did, he... And Mama and Shawn, where are they?"

 _TALK, you useless fucking piece of shit. Say ANYTHING._

"They ain't here." He's dropped his hand away from her shoulder but he touches her again, wanting to do more and not sure if he should or can or how he should touch her even if he did, and he can't. Can't do what he really wants to do and pull her close, pull her against him. When he tried before, she fought to get away from him, and he's not sure he can bear that now. "They're dead, Beth. You ain't dead."

"I am." The tears are running down her face but she's gentle now, like _she's_ the one comforting _him,_ and she reaches up and brushes his hair aside and lays her warm little hand against his cheek. Small and soft - a child's hand. She was a child, a girl, and that was torn away from her, burned out of her, blown to hell, and then he ruined what was left, because he does.

And she's too young for this monstrosity but she's not a child anymore. She hasn't been one for so long.

"I am," she repeats, that same terrible, relentless gentleness in her voice and her face and her eyes, and her hand. She strokes her thumb across his cheekbone. "So are you. We all are. We're all dead. We have been for a long time. Look around. You think this is livin'?"

She shakes her head. "We're all dead, Daryl. I know why Daddy and Mama and Shawn aren't here. We're all dead, and this is Hell."

* * *

She doesn't speak for the rest of the day. He leaves her alone. They eat dinner in total silence; he doesn't try to talk to her. He's not sure he can deal with whatever she might say. She seems perfectly calm now, perfectly content in her blank kind of way, and he'll take that as enough.

He doesn't make a fire. It's not as cold tonight and they should probably go easy on the stacked wood, and anyway he doesn't want to. Like she's a child he gets her to change and wash her face and brush her teeth, and like she's a child he puts her to bed again, tucks her in, sits with her for a few moments as her breathing slows. He doesn't touch her.

The moon is up again, and bright, and it bleeds all the color out of her. Motionless, she's a carving. She's stone.

 _We're all dead, and this is Hell._

Just now, he doesn't know that he would argue with that.

 _We'll try again tomorrow._


	3. every clash brings out a warning

**Chapter 3: every clash brings out a warning**

The next morning is the first time he finds her on the deck.

Nothing he can identify wakes him. He simply wakes up all at once, sitting up, eyes wide and focused, looking around. It's not the first time he's come awake like this; it's a cultivated skill, and he could do it long before the Turn. It's about survival, about self-defense; you're never safe, especially not when you sleep, when your old man staggers in at three in the am after a bender of epic proportions and he's looking to visit some hurt on whoever is available for visiting. You can't afford grogginess. It's a luxury. You wake up before you know why and you do what you have to do: you cower in a closet, under the bed, you lock yourself in the bathroom because it's the one door that has a lock on it - though it never works. All it does is buy you a few minutes. Maybe gives him a chance to calm down enough that he doesn't actually kill you this time.

Then, later, you wake up in the dark, in the thick of the night, because you know something is wrong even if you have no idea what it is. You know there's something out there. Something moved, crunched through branches, rustled some leaves, or there's an unnatural absence of birdsong - maybe not something most other people would hear but it was there. You're alert enough to run. Aim. Shoot. Kill. You can do this because if you can't the people you love die, and that's a very simple equation. It requires no thought whatsoever.

You wake up when something is wrong, and later you actually think about what it was.

He's sitting up in the gray dawn, sheets pooling around his waist, fully and vividly conscious, and Beth is gone.

His first job whenever this happens is to not panic. When you panic you might as well have stayed the fuck asleep for all the good you can do.

He shoves himself up off the mattress and throws on his boots without bothering with a shirt. Reaches for the bow but that's habit; he absolutely should not have the bow. This place is very remote but it's not completely secure, there are no walls but the cliff, and it's by no means impossible that a walker or two or even more could have staggered up this far. But he has his knife - couldn't put that away despite the danger, he can't be completely unarmed - and unless things are truly dire it'll be enough.

He somehow didn't think about her just... leaving. Why the fuck didn't he _think_ of that? Why did he just _assume_ she would stay put? The second she said she should be down with the other walkers in the town, warning bells should have clanged deafeningly in his head. If she got an idea like that, if she could focus enough to retain that logic...

 _Stop._

"Beth?"

Nothing. Not that she would necessarily answer. Not that she would even necessarily hear him or understand what she was hearing. He hurries up the few stairs while trying not to hurry, trying not to clomp like a fucking Clydesdale against the wood, and checks bedrooms one, two, and three. Both bathrooms. Closets. Back downstairs: half bath near the foyer. Pantry. More closets.

She isn't here. She's gone.

For the love of _God,_ if you panic _you're no good to her at all._

Back into the main room - and he sees it.

The whole far wall of the room is glass, but to the side is the deck and smaller panes of glass, and a sliding door leading out. The deck itself wasn't visible from where he slept. He never went close enough to her bed to see it. It never occurred to him to look.

The door is very slightly open. The gap is so narrow that he didn't feel the air - or he wasn't aware that he did. But maybe he did.

Maybe that was why.

Beth is on the deck, leaning against the railing - leaning over it. Looking down. Her big t-shirt is rippling against her body, and her hair is too short to stream behind her like once it would have but it rises around her head like a halo, glowing. Lighting her up as the sun touches her.

All he can do is stand there and look at her, and try to believe the sheer _reality_ of her all over again.

She's leaning. Leaning over very far.

He pulls in a huge breath and goes to the door, slides it the rest of the way open, steps out onto the deck.

It's a nice deck, for a given value of _nice,_ just like the rest of the place. It's big but not ridiculously so, and there's a rectangle of chairs and a loveseat and a firepit in the center. Far to his right there's a covered wooden box that he recognizes as an extremely elegantly designed hot tub. Before, he came out here only long enough to check that it was clear, and he didn't really notice what was over the railing. What was in front of him.

Both the deck and the windows in the main room look out over the cliff and down the whole mountain. The road they took up here is visible through the trees as a winding gray ribbon, and further down the roofs of the town lie nestled in more trees - a few places where it's clearer. McDonald's arches, last defiant stand of Americana. A gas station sign.

But the mountains. All in front of him, the Blue Ridge mountains, misty and purple-blue in the first edges of true sunlight, carpeted in thick green, rolling and rising and falling away again. Graceful in a way that bespeaks profound age. Only very old things are allowed to be beautiful like this.

They earn it.

It was here. He knew it was here. He put her in front of it, in part because he wanted her to see it. But he didn't really see it himself until now.

She hasn't moved. Standing here in the wind with no shirt on, he's only dimly aware that he's shivering.

"Beth?"

And as he says her name, the wind brings him an answer in the form of the splintering crash of something shattering against the rocks below.

"Beth." He moves up beside her - slow. Nothing sudden. But she doesn't turn, doesn't look at him - she keeps her attention fixed firmly on what's beneath her, which is an almost sheer drop of at least two hundred feet. He's not afraid of heights, not especially - though neither is he overly fond of them - but he looks down at that plunge of stone and his stomach twists in on itself and the world spins.

So instead he looks at her. She has something in her hand, and before he can see what it is or stop her she extends her arm and releases it, and just before it spins out of his clear line of sight he sees that it's one of the glass sculptures from the bookshelf in the living room. Tumbling end over end, glittering black like obsidian, and smashing itself into a dust cloud of shards against a jut in the rock about twenty feet down.

He stares at this for a few seconds. At where it was. Then up at her.

Her hands are empty and she's smiling. And she raises her head, and she sees him. She sees him completely, and she's bright with recognition.

"Daryl. Hi."

* * *

He doesn't know what to make of this.

She's not herself. Not even close. He's not so stupid as to think that, to see that she's made a deeper foray into the world than he's yet gotten her to make on his own and think that everything is fine again. She still eats the breakfast he lays out for her with no indication that she tastes it at all, and now and then her eyes still slip out of focus. But she's _here,_ she _knows_ _him,_ and when he asks her about the deck she doesn't hesitate before answering him.

"I woke up. Couldn't get back to sleep." She shrugs and forks canned peach into her mouth, swallows it almost without bothering to chew. "It's pretty out there."

"Yeah. It is." He watches her. Watches the movement of her hand, the tilt of her head, every minute twitch and shift of her facial muscles. Her. Her, looking for her. Any sign of her, beyond what he already has. "What were you doin' with the glass?"

"What glass?"

"The thing from the shelf." He's trying to sound like it's no big deal, like it's not a very extremely terrifyingly huge deal. Trying to sound conversational. Keeping it light. Oh, that's fine, people toss shit down mountains all the time. "The stuff you were droppin' over the edge. Why'd you do that?"

"Oh."

She pauses, and as he watches, her eyes shift out of focus again and she blanks. Goes away. _Absence seizure,_ Edwards called it. They happen now. Her brain hiccuping. Not in themselves dangerous, provided they don't turn into anything else, but if they do? He's not a doctor and he's an idiot and he dragged her up a mountain.

And he's still not getting on the bike and taking her home.

She blinks and she's back. "I dunno. I like watchin' 'em fall. I like watchin' 'em break." She smiles again, and it's small and it should be sweet but there's something wrong with it. He doesn't know what or why but there is. "It's pretty too."

 _Don't do it no more,_ he almost says, and then he remembers the promise he made to himself and, though she didn't know it, to her. If she's not hurting herself, if she's not trying to hurt him, he won't stop her. She gets to follow her bizarre little whims to whatever bizarre little end they lead her.

"Yeah, well. Take it easy. We only got so much crap in here to throw off cliffs."

She shrugs and returns to her peaches.

* * *

So he decides he can risk it.

She's been in the back bedroom reading all morning. He goes to her with the bow over his shoulder, and when she hears his boots on the hardwood she turns.

 _The Secret Garden_ again. He recognizes it without having to see the title.

"I gotta go to town."

She cocks her head, brows slightly knitted, and that's when he knows he fucked up. Maybe not badly, but he underestimated her, or he overestimated the degree of her damage or at least the ways in which it operates, thought these different states into which she falls were different enough that she wouldn't remember between one and the next, and he fucked up and he has to deal with it now.

"You're not takin' me?"

He shrugs. _You fucking idiot._ "No need. Just goin' for a few things."

"You said you needed someone to watch your back." She shifts where she's sitting, facing him a little more directly. Her expression hasn't changed, nor has her even, light tone, but he looks at the hand gripping the book and it's shaking. Knuckles white. Fingers hooked. Ready to claw and scratch. "You said you'd feel better."

 _You. Fucking. Idiot._ "Ain't that bad. I'll be alright."

She looks at him for a long moment. He can't read her at all, and he can't tell if it's because she's hiding from him or because there's nothing there to read. But her grip hasn't loosened. He wonders if she's breaking her fingernails.

He shouldn't go. He shouldn't. But she seems... If he leaves her for an hour. If he leaves her for an hour and he comes back and instead of glass it's her body broken on the rocks, her bones splintered and skull shattered and her blood smears and spatters and pools of black paint across the cliff face.

It would make the rest of his life very simple. What little of it there would be.

 _If she's going to do it, she'll find a way._

Abruptly she smiles. It's not wide, but it's there, and he doesn't see any indication that it's forced or faked. Her hand has loosened. She is, if not his Beth, as close as he's probably going to get right now.

"Alright," she says, and turns her attention back to her book. "Be careful."

All right.

An hour. She can survive that long without him. They both can.

* * *

He's almost wrong.

They all got good at estimating the danger in any given place, and they did so quickly. Had to. It was that or die. It couldn't just be about the walkers you saw; it had to be about the ones you _weren't_ seeing, because those were the ones that always killed you. By definition you didn't know for a fact that they were there, nor did you necessarily know where they were, but you could look at the space, the terrain, the layout, count the visible walkers and how they were dispersed, and draw conclusions from that. You could get a general idea of what you might be up against. You could very well be wrong, it could very well cost you, but it was and is better than blundering around praying you haven't lethally fucked up by being there at all.

They only passed through town on the way up, but he saw almost nothing that concerned him. Very little in terms of real destruction. Nothing burned out too badly - a few places down side streets where it looked like there had been fires, and while the McDonald's arches still stand the McDonald's itself is a blackened half-frame, but so much of the rest of it seemed intact. That meant there hadn't been many people to fuck it up when everything well and truly went to shit. Hadn't been many people to do the damage out of panic or stupid greed or rage or despair. Only a couple bodies on the sidewalks, desiccated and picked over by carrion hunters, and only a few bodies means there weren't many people to do the dying. Plenty of people die in their homes, he's seen that - mostly from _opting out_ \- but only a few slow, stupid walkers is another good sign.

This place is a goldmine. A treasure. Or it could be. There are so many things to hate about this situation he's plunged them into, but this is a bright spot and he's going to cling to it until he has no more reason to do so.

He hits a pharmacy - broken front windows but not looted too badly. These were people who had specific items in mind, found them and took them and took their leave. There's aspirin, vitamins, and the back is still fairly well-stocked with antibiotics. He takes everything he reasonably can. He can come back for more if he has to.

There's Xanax. Klonopin. He takes some of both and he despises that he's doing so, but really?

He's not sure Beth is the only one who might need them.

Antibacterial soap. Toothpaste. People are stupid about that last; they never realize that teeth will become a Thing after the apocalypse and they never think about it. They never think about abscesses. They never think about what it's like to die that way.

Simple lack of imagination has probably killed more people than walkers, in this world.

Out of the pharmacy and past Cute Antique and Gift Shoppes and toward the convenience-and-tiny grocery store he spotted on the way. Door unlocked and no broken windows - God, he can't _believe_ this place actually exists twenty minutes away from where they're based. Someone went through here as well, scattered things around, but they didn't take too much, and he moves through the aisles, pack open, piling in jerky, tuna fish, beans, chili, powdered lemonade, more fruit and vegetables - _peanut butter and jelly and a couple cans of soda,_ Jesus - and he skids to a halt in the candy aisle.

She told him. Once by the fire after the shack burned, when things started getting better, they were stupid and wistful and talked about the foods they missed most. He missed barbecue ribs slathered in sauce, as much grease as possible and bones to gnaw on like a dog. He missed corn on the cob. He missed chicken nuggets where the chicken was totally fake and he missed pie of all kinds. He missed gummy worms, a holdover from childhood. She missed cake, any kind of cake - she _would_ be a Cake Person, there are two kinds of people in the world - and ice cream, and her mom's chicken salad, and bacon, and spaghetti and meatballs. Hershel made the meatballs himself and she and Maggie and Shawn all helped even though it wasn't necessary. She missed pie too. They talked about pie for a while - he favored cherry and she liked coconut cream and they argued the various merits of both.

She said she loved M&Ms. She loved the blue ones best. He told her she was crazy. She told him she didn't care what he thought and he fully believed she didn't, and he thought that was just fine.

There's a jumbo bag of M&Ms on the floor right in front of him.

He bends and scoops it up, packs it.

He goes out the rear, and that's his mistake.

He's not incautious. That's not the problem. It's just stupid, cruel luck. He steps out onto a stoop and into a fenced-in lot containing dumpsters and some wooden pallets and an ancient truck, and a pile of half-eaten bodies, and about thirty walkers. He's taking this in, bow up, his gut dropping toward his boots and adrenaline already pounding through him, but that practiced veneer of icy calm has descended over his mind, and he's about to thrust himself back through the door when one lunges at him from behind the dumpster beside him, hissing, and he swings instinctively aside and brains it with the limb of the bow.

And the door swings shut.

He fumbles behind him for the handle. It doesn't budge. It locked after him.

Okay. So. _This is a thing now._

Something happened. He has no idea what and he has no time to figure it out, but something happened here, at some point in the probably-distant past someone did _something_ to bring about this state of affairs, and as thirty walkers turn in his direction and start staggering eagerly toward him - _oh HEY, oh my God, we were wondering if anyone would come, this is great_ \- he curses their name and the names of their ancestors and the names of their descendents unto the third generation if the assholes have any.

Hanging strings of decay and sun gleaming dully off exposed bone and impossibly damp flesh, and rolling cloudy eyes and teeth, lots and lots of teeth, and the fence to his left - where the bodies are - is blocked by a solid wall of them and the fence to his right might be reachable but he can see the gate there secured by a chain almost the width of his wrist.

And directly ahead of him, the brick wall and gently slanted roof of the next building over, and another dumpster.

Might be enough. Might. It's all he has.

 _You fuck this up, she dies. You know that. If she doesn't starve first or opt out she_ will _eventually wander down here, looking for her_ kin, _and that's exactly what they'll make her into if they don't just rip her apart._

He smashes in the skulls of the two closest to him, kicks a third back and to the side, opens a gap and throws the bow onto his back, sprints.

He's carrying a bit of a load - which he should just _drop,_ fuck it to _hell_ \- and he's not the fastest runner. He's always been more about distance; he can and has run for hours at a stretch. He knows this is basically suicide, no matter what happens or how hard he tries, and as he barrels through the dead crowd he feels hands groping for him, tearing at his shirt, the pack, a few grabbing onto and almost holding his hair. Teeth clicking what seems like centimeters from his head, ears full of groans, lungs full of air so foul he almost retches. He was used to the stench of them, still is, but this is worse somehow, so concentrated, and he's running through a wall of everything, running to her, for her, running to get back to her, and it feels like he _has_ been running for hours and this time he's _not giving up._

He's going to save her. They still get to save people. He's going to get it right.

One of them closes its bone-fingers on his shoulder - astonishingly strong for something that barely has muscles anymore - yanks him backward and he almost goes down. And he screams, _wrenches,_ feels something in his arm wrench too and burst into fire, and his hands close on the edge of the dumpster and he vaults himself up, scrabbling at the brick, jumping and seizing the edge of the gutter and _Jesus Christ you're too heavy you're too fucking heavy no way it holds you_ but his boots connect with the brick and he heaves himself up and his knees hit the roof and he's over. He crawls, clawing for air, rolling half onto his ass and staring behind him.

They can't jump. And he doesn't think any of them can reach that high. He might be okay. He might be.

His left arm is a series of sustained explosions. If he's scratched, that was all for nothing.

He doesn't check. He scrambles to the edge of the front of the building, tosses the pack over first, drops down, ignores the white stab of pain in his ankles and shins as he lands upright on the sidewalk. He can hear them, groaning and furiously disappointed and rattling the chainlink like angry prisoners in a riot, and he snatches the pack up again and hurls himself at the intersection where he left the bike.

The roar of it is a blanket wrapping itself around his mind.

* * *

Halfway up he stops dead, cuts the engine, gets off the bike, goes to the edge of the road and throws up.

It seems like it goes on for a while, though it can't be more than a few seconds, and by the time the heaving stops his nose is burning, eyes streaming with tears, and he staggers a couple of yards away, arm bursting into fresh yells, and crouches and swipes his hands over his face and thinks, simply, _whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck_

He's never reacted like this before. Never. He's stomped their skulls in, gutted them, hacked off arms and legs, took their heads off with a fucking chain. She said they used to be people and that was sweet and it stabbed him right in the ventricles, and she was _right,_ but they aren't people and even if killing them _isn't supposed to be fun_ he stopped being bothered by it a long time ago. And he got used to the looming prospect of his own death right around the same time.

Because he's going to die out here. Sometime, someday. Every minute he remains alive is borrowed time. He knows that. Rick wasn't right, not the way he was talking, but he was right in a sense. That sense. They are walking dead. He just about accepted it. He would walk into a situation like that down there, deal with it, get out, let the adrenaline bleed out of him, move on. Not think about it anymore because you can't, because you have to put it away, or it kills you.

 _Here._

But he's shaking and he can't stop, because he almost didn't make it back. He didn't think to drop the pack until it didn't really matter. He wasn't careless, but he could have been more careful. He was so focused on fucking M&Ms. She did this to him.

She made him weak.

He can't afford that.

He shoves himself to his feet and goes back to the bike, pulls out the bottle of water he brought, rinses his mouth out. It doesn't help a whole lot - and he's spattered with rotting blood and brains and grime - but it's the best he can do. He lifts his arm, turns it, cranes his neck, bites his lips to keep back the wince even though there's no one to play stoic for. But he already knew it wasn't a scratch. He recognizes the deep, persistent burn of a damaged muscle.

Or something else. Damaged, anyway.

This whole thing is really not going very well.

Back on the bike. Deep breath. Deep breath, you fucking pussy. You stupid piece of shit, you breathe and you go the fuck back up there and _you handle this._

He does.

* * *

First couple things, he does. _Handling it_ is very much a work in progress and its future frankly remains questionable.

The house is quiet when he walks through the door, and he doesn't know yet whether or not to consider that a good thing. Probably there's no rule that applies there, nothing he can trust to hold consistent from situation to situation. There are any number of reasons why she wouldn't be making any noise.

In fact, given how she's been, it would be weird if she was.

Sighing, he moves through the foyer and into the main room, pack and crossbow combining to make a weight he honestly can't believe he's still carrying. The fire in his arm has died down to embers, but he's going to need painkillers. A fuck of a lot of painkillers. Best case, he strained something. Worst case, something is actually torn. Soft tissue injuries take forever to heal.

This is probably just his life now.

And he forgets it, because she's there.

Sitting crosslegged on her mattress, partially turned toward the window and bent over something - like she was with the book, and he thinks it might be the book, but as he slows, stops and looks at her, he sees that she's not holding her hands right to be reading.

She looks like she's writing.

"Beth?"

He forgets that he must look awful, must _smell_ awful, walker and vomit, and sets down the pack and the bow and takes another step toward her. She doesn't look up, doesn't appear to be aware of him, but the way she's sitting - not those slumped shoulders, the subtle but fundamental lack of muscle tension that comes over her whenever she blanks out or slips away. She might not be aware of him, but she's very much aware of something, intent on it. Hand moving.

It clouded over about halfway back up, but she still glows.

"Beth. Hey." He takes another step and pauses, watching her. "I'm back."

 _I brought you presents._

She turns and looks up. She looks up, and like before, it's _her,_ almost - awake and present and real. Thinking, even if her thoughts are broken and scattered and don't fit together anymore, a jumble of puzzle pieces from two or three different puzzles. Her eyes focus on him and she smiles - small but there, undeniable, and his lungs simultaneously try to expel all the air inside them and fill themselves as full as possible.

"Hi, Daryl."

She _is_ writing. She's writing in a journal.

Or that's what it looks like. Blank pages, anyway, and lined. A journal, some kind of day planner; whatever, she found it somewhere, she understood what it was for, she probably remembered that she used to have her own, found a pen - _looked_ for a pen - now she's... writing in it. Using it again.

She burned hers. She burned it for their fires. That always bothered him, so much, and he never told her. Never told her that part of him had wanted to tell her to stop.

He closes the rest of the distance between them and crouches. "You doin' alright? Anythin' happen?"

 _Like what?_

"I'm fine." She sounds bemused, unsure of why he would ask. "You..." Something snaps into increasing sharpness in her gaze, her eyes widen a bit, and he realizes that when he came in she saw him well enough to know he was there and to recognize him, but now she really _sees_ him, and she sees the state he's in. And she's concerned.

She's concerned. She's looking at him, she understands what she's seeing, and she's concerned about it. About _him._

Okay.

"Are _you_ alright?"

"I. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't..." He shrugs. He's covered in gut and blood and brain. Once that was just a normal day for them. "Ran into a little trouble, wasn't nothin'."

She wrinkles her nose. "You don't smell very good."

"I know. I'll deal with it." Running water means showers. They'll be freezing, but they do exist. For the moment he's just focused on fighting back his almost overwhelming joy. "Whatcha writin'?"

"I dunno. Just stuff."

"Can I see?"

He's expecting her to hesitate. To refuse, actually. He's not sure why, hasn't exactly thought the assumption through; he just _assumed,_ so he's essentially unprepared for what she does do, which is immediately hold the journal out to him - open - without a word.

Or a discernible expression. She just now had one - a little vague, but it was there. First she was vaguely pleased to see him, then she was vaguely concerned for him, and now she's gone flat again. Not _gone,_ but part of her has receded. Or, perhaps more accurately, her damage has swept back over her, like a tide subject to gravitational forces he hasn't yet identified.

He looks at her for a second or two, then down at the journal in his hands.

She always had very neat handwriting. Not fancy, not elegant - neat, plain, but also graceful in a way he was never able to define, and which seemed so much a part of her. It's not the kind of detail he recalls making a point of noticing. He probably never did make a _point_ of it. That's just not how he is.

He remembers. He watched that neat, graceful writing go up in literal smoke.

What's on the pages he's looking at isn't neat. It isn't graceful. It's a scrawl, wandering and wobbling, paying no fealty to the lines, and written so hard that the pen has nearly ripped through the paper. It's the handwriting of a child only just beginning to learn how to form letters, just beginning to figure out how to make her hand and fingers perform this delicate task. And there's nothing about her thoughts, her feelings, what's happening, what she remembers happening - no element of internal narrative whatsoever. It's one very simple arrangement of letters, hurtling down the page like an avalanche.

 _BETHGREENEBETHGREENEBETHGREENEBETHGREENEBETHGREENEBETHGREENE_

He bites down on the corner of his lip and he's quiet.

He's not a doctor, not a shrink, vastly out of his element, but he knows what this is. He doesn't think you have to be either of the former in order to see it and understand. Her brain hiccups, blanks out; here, it's grabbed onto something from before her world was blown apart and it's circling it wildly, almost hysterically, clutching onto this single bright fragment and trying to drag it out into the world where it's real.

He's cold all over. But she's writing. And she knows her name, and she _knows_ that she knows it. Even though he's not sure she's aware of what she's been scratching across the pages.

Some part of her is trying to fix itself.

He looks up at her. She's sitting exactly as she was when he took his eyes off her, face impassive and gaze flat. But she's not gone. She's focused on him. She's _there,_ and he thinks she still sees and hears. Might be able to process. Even if she doesn't show it. Even if he can't tell.

It's occurred to him - though he tries not to think about it too much - that a tiny, fully conscious part of her might be trapped behind her blank gaze, terrified, unable to reach or be reached, screaming for rescue.

He holds the journal out to her and she takes it back, holds it loosely in her lap. Good sign, probably.

"You remember your name, Beth?" Because this is something. She seems fixated on this, on some level, so maybe it can be a point of entry. "You whole name. You remember what it is?"

She cocks her head a little, frowning very slightly, and hope flutters across his diaphragm.

"Can you tell me? Your middle name?"

She told him. Another by-the-fire conversation, moving into weird little confessions, not any form of I Never but merely a We've-Been-Together-This-Long-And-I-Hardly-Know-You-So-Let's-Change-That kind of thing. Trading. Her full name for... Whatever he wanted to tell her. After I Never, she wasn't going to make any specific demands. Wasn't going to put him any more on the spot than he was comfortable with.

He was so grateful to her for that. So desperately grateful and he never found a way to say thank you.

He told her about the first time he smoked a cigarette. He was six, Merle shoved one at him while three of Merle's more goonish friends stood around and faked encouragement, and Daryl took one drag and careened into a coughing fit so bad he almost puked while everyone else laughed their asses off.

He told her this story with no shame and no trepidation. He was surprised by the absence of those things. Then he wasn't.

Her name. Full name. He thought it was pretty. He didn't tell her so.

"Beth, c'mon. I know you know." He's forgotten himself, forgotten how he looks and smells and what he's spattered with, what happened, forgotten everything but her - this girl all lit up and breathing and alive in front of him, looking at him, and he could _swear_ she's trying. Could swear he sees it in her eyes. "You told me. Tell me again."

There's that odd _snap i_ n her again. Like the teeth of gears slotting into place. She opens her mouth and she's going to say it, he's going to have found that part of her, reached it, touched it for just a second. Made contact.

She opens her mouth and her hands fly to it, and with cold determination she begins to bite at her own fingers.

For a second he can't move. He's seen her do it but he hasn't seen her do it like _this,_ not just her nails but her _teeth,_ no sign that she feels any pain or intends to stop until her hands are bloody stumps. She's trying to fucking eat herself, and he lunges, seizes her wrists and drags them away from her face, blood already running down her chin and the flesh on the fore and middle fingers of her right hand churned and torn. She's fighting him but not with any anger. Not even any frustration. She's fighting him with no emotion at all, fighting him calmly. Fighting him like a machine whose basic function is being interrupted. Wrenching her forearms in his grip, twisting, bones grinding and popping, and fuck, she might actually _break her fucking wrists trying to-_

" _Stop._ "

He's not yelling. Not barking, not growling. He's never heard himself sound like that. Solid, steel, _quiet._ There's no anger in it, because he feels none, but he does _feel,_ and what he feels is relentless and terrible and pounding between his ears, and it makes him feel a thousand years old.

And she stops.

Or almost. She's not struggling anymore. She's trembling, still on the edge of violent, but he can't detect any more fight in it. She's just... She's not in control.

So he has to be.

Bit by bit he loosens his grip, and as her trembling eases, bit by bit he pulls her closer to him. She's still flat, but that doesn't mean she isn't scared. Somewhere. Just as scared as he is. If not more. Much, much more.

"Don't do that," he whispers. Loose now, stroking his thumbs slowly up and down the knobs of her wrists. He's staring into her eyes and she's staring back, and she _does_ see him. She does. Her bloody mouth working, like she might still be about to speak, and somewhere behind those horrible _dead_ eyes, he's positive he sees that spark again. "Please don't do that, girl. Please don't."

She pulls in a breath - huge. Her whole body seems to swell. Then it folds inward in a gust and she lowers her head and slumps. Not limp, but she's well and truly gone now. Which might be for the best.

He's numb. That's also for the best. Later, maybe, he can allow himself to react to this.

He waits until he's sure she's not moving anymore. Then he releases her and goes to get the first aid kit.

* * *

The bites in her fingers aren't actually as bad as he was afraid of. He had horrible visions of exposed bone; there isn't any. They bled a lot, as hand wounds tend to do. He cleans them and bandages them, and he gently tips her head back and wipes the blood off her face. Her eyes are open but glassy and completely unfocused, her pupils slightly dilated.

He lays his free hand against her cheek for a moment, cups it. He doesn't think she can see him or feel what he's doing, and he doesn't imagine she can hear him. But maybe she can. Who knows. Maybe she always can.

"Your name is Bethany Ann," he murmurs. "Bethany Ann Greene. Remember that. I'm gonna ask you again."

He waits for another few seconds, holding her, watching her breathe, watching her slow, slow blinking. Then he lays her down - carefully, arranging her as comfortably as he can - and watches her for a few minutes more. Watching every part of her. Her hands, her fingers. Looking for twitching. Watching the rise and fall of her chest, timing the intervals. Her mouth, her eyes, for any sign at all that she's coming back. Of which there's none.

She's still so bright.

At last he hauls himself to his feet, gives her one more look, and heads upstairs.

The shower is freezing. He stands under it until he can't feel anything anymore, watching the water circle the drain - brown to pink to clear. All white tile, all around him. White like a hospital. White like a morgue.

He can't do this.

He doesn't know what else to do.

* * *

When he comes back down - mostly dry and dressed in clothes he guesses count as almost sort of clean - she's sitting up and she's awake, and she seems to have at least partially re-entered herself, even if she doesn't intend to stay.

She looks up at him when he comes to her and crouches in front of her. Looks down at her bandaged fingers - held awkwardly in her lap - and up at him again. She's apparently cognizant enough to be confused about what she's seeing. More than confused, in fact; her eyes are wide and lips slightly parted the way they always are when she's nervous and she can't hide it.

Not because of him. Not made nervous _by_ him. He's pretty sure.

"What happened?"

"You had an accident."

He's not going to tell her. He's not sure _how_ to tell her. It now seems like she does remember some things from period to period, but he hasn't seen any indication - nor did Edwards say - that she's conscious of the things she does to herself when she's at her worst. Or if she's at all conscious of it, she doesn't know what it means. It holds no significance for her one way or the other.

She lifts her hand, cradles it against her chest. "It hurts."

"I'll get you some stuff for it." Not positive how effective what he has will be, but it'll be something. And _he_ needs something. The cold water calmed a little of the angry red throbbing in his arm, but he can feel it starting back up, and it's going to be much worse tomorrow.

He's not sure yet how this is going to affect use of the bow. He hasn't checked. It could be a problem. Almost certainly will be. Right now he frankly doesn't want to know how much of one.

There's only so much he can take in such a compressed period of time.

But he's still cold, is the thing. Still. When he spoke to her like he did - _Stop_ \- some switch in him flipped off and another one flipped on, and now everything is at a distance. It's there, he can feel it, but it's removed from the dullness his core has become. It wasn't something he consciously intended to do. He just did it.

 _You have to let yourself feel it._

 _No I do fucking not._ It serves no purpose. It doesn't help either of them.

He's doubtful he can maintain it for very long anyway.

She's staring down at the bandage again - lifting her hand, turning it, her expression now oddly wondering. "Why did you bother?"

He sighs and scrubs a hand down his face, hair hanging in his eyes. "'cause you was bleedin' everywhere."

"But it's pointless." She spreads her fingers and looks at him through them, one eye framed by the V of her middle and ring fingers. "I'm just gonna rot anyway. We're all gonna rot away to nothin'."

"We ain't."

"We are." She sighs and drops her hand, glances away and out at the low, gathering clouds. "I wish it would hurry up and happen. I want it to be done. I'm tired. I'm tired of walkin'." Her voice softens, fades, becomes little more than a breath slipping across clean white walls. "I want it all to be over."

He doesn't say anything. He watches her, studies her. What he can see of her face, the corner of her mouth, her slow-blinking eyes. He's still cold, still dull, but everything he's keeping at bay is already pressing in on him - sick, lurching exhaustion, heaviness, gravity increasing its hold on him tenfold. He's known since he began to understand some of the nature of her wounds that she was very possibly - very _probably_ \- suicidal, at least on some level, even if she never really made a concerted effort to go through with it. But that was an intellectual understanding. It was superficial. He knew but he didn't _know._ Now he's faced with it: what amounts to an explicit statement that she's looking forward to not existing anymore. Regardless of whether or not she believes she'll actually cease to exist.

"Beth," he says softly, and reaches for her. Because this is one of the few side benefits of running low on fucks to give: The list of things you have to try to keep yourself from doing shrinks significantly. And he touched her before, pulled her close even if he didn't hold her, and she let him. She was mostly gone by then, but she let him.

And he doesn't know that he's actually doing her any favors by not touching her.

And he fucking needs to.

She flinches, eyelids fluttering like she expects some kind of blow, but she doesn't pull away when he combs his fingers into her hair - God, so short, so much of it gone, how it might have tumbled over his hand, tangled around his knuckles - and when he cups the side of her head she actually…

She leans into it. Very, very slightly. She leans, pressure and warmth against his hand, and he forces air into and out of his lungs.

"You're not gonna rot. You ain't dead. You ain't. You're here. You're _right here._ "

 _So try._

He waits for a few seconds, holding her, staring at her. She stares back, no longer flinching, no longer nervous, no longer with the same numb weariness that had seeped into her tone. She stares back, and she's there. Locked. Locked onto him. That spark, flaring for a fraction of a fraction of a second, he _does_ see it, it _is_ there-

And she's gone again. Blank. Her head droops slightly, her eyes sliding out of focus.

He watches her. He watches her for what seems like a good while, and the last of the color appears to seep out of everything. Eventually he withdraws his hand and gets up, and turns away from her.

Cold again. All over. At some point he'll feel it. He'll let himself, if it doesn't devour him first. But she's gone and he's cold, and once again he thinks that might actually be a best-case-scenario.

He goes to the pack and hauls it up onto his right shoulder, winces when the left one complains anyway, and he's almost to the kitchen when she speaks.

"Bethany Ann."

He was cold. Now he freezes, limbs locked, gut a pit of ice, veins frost. He doesn't turn. He can't. Because what if he just imagined it. What if he turns back and it was in his head, something between a desperate fantasy and an even more desperate hallucination, and she's sitting slumped like a broken puppet, eyes glazed and jaw loose and hands limp and useless and chewed on her thighs.

"Bethany Ann," she says again. Very soft. "You said you were gonna ask. You don't have to ask. Bethany Ann. Bethany Ann Greene."


	4. mine for gold in a heart of lead

**Chapter 4: mine for gold in a heart of lead**

She's back with him for the rest of the night.

She doesn't talk much. Really, she doesn't talk at all. She sits on the mattress, and then she sits on the sofa, and the whole time she's writing and doing so furiously - no pauses, no thinking of the right phrase or word, no time to consider what she's going to write next, because there is no thinking or consideration. Just her brain spinning its wheels.

But it's something.

He gets her some painkillers, gets some for himself. He doesn't know about her, but they do help him a little. He unpacks the pack. He takes inventory of the food he grabbed and mulls over the idea of actually storing it all somewhere, then decides that's stupid and just piles it on the counter. He makes a fire. When he does, the endless scratching sound of her pen falls silent, and he turns to see her staring at him, at the tongue of flame he's coaxed into being. Her face is impassive, but he doesn't think it's blankness. He doesn't think she's numb in there. Not right now.

Looking at him and at the fire, her journal clutched in her hands. Closing it, bringing it to her chest. Hugging it, like she suspects that he might make a grab for it. Outside the gray day is bleeding into a deeper gray dusk, and for the present the fire is the only light. It tosses shadows across her face with wild abandon, cutting over her scars and the first hints of lines, making her look like a crone one second and a child the next. Somewhere in between the two is her, but he has no idea where to look.

"I'm not gonna burn it," he says. Low, gentle. He doesn't know if that's what she's thinking, and in fact she might not be _thinking_ much of anything. Much of the time he thinks she's probably a creature of instinct, jerked around by emotions and torn, gauzy memories instead of careful reasoning.

Except for the part of her that maintains that she's dead. That part… He thinks that part has given itself an awful lot of insane thought.

For a long moment she just looks at him. Then, slowly, she releases the journal and lowers it into her lap, opens it, and goes back to writing her endless preschooler's signature.

He goes back to the fire. Builds it up. Returns to the kitchen and starts to make dinner.

* * *

She stares down at the plate when he puts it in front of her, and he can tell it's conscious staring. It's staring with weight. She's looking at what he's given her and she doesn't get it, and she's trying to do so. And he's trying not to hope, and as usual he's failing miserably.

Scoops of peanut butter. Scoops of jelly. Some crackers to smear it on if that's something she wants to do. He gave himself the same, and now, sitting beside her and looking at it in the firelight, in spite of the hope he's not sure about it. Not sure he should have. And it's not about _her,_ not because he's worried about _her;_ she might be having a good patch after such a bad one but he would still be surprised if this alone got much out of her. It's about looking down the peanut butter and the jelly and thinking about how he knows they'll taste, and looking at her with her face and hair gone all fire-gold and edged with red, and the way he felt himself looking at her then that night and wanting to _say_ something, no idea what the fuck it was, just _looking_ at her and silently imploring her to understand because he could never say it at all. Wouldn't even know how to begin.

Looking at her with grape jelly still piercingly sweet on his tongue, and her little smile slipping away from her mouth.

 _Oh._

He'll torture himself if it helps her. He'll do it every waking second.

He gave her a spoon. Moving tentatively now, she uses it. Scoops up some peanut butter, scoops up some jelly, eats. He watches her, his own helpings untouched, and squeezes his hands into painful, biting fists.

She just eats. Mechanical as always. She still might not get it, but she no longer cares. She doesn't need to. What's on the plate in front of her is calories. She's refueling the machine that is her.

He gave her a can of soda. She drinks it with the same mindless instinct to consume.

He doesn't eat his, doesn't drink his. He gets up and returns to the kitchen, tosses the plate in the sink with a sound like breaking - not checking to see if it broke or not and not giving a shit - and grabs a can of chili and cuts it open and eats it cold. He eats it leaning against the counter and staring across the cavernous room at the fire, at her silhouetted against it, head lifted as she gazes into its heart, and he isn't thinking about that. Isn't thinking about anything.

He'll see her blankness and raise her his own.

* * *

They're settling into a bedtime routine, of a kind. Face, hands, teeth. There's no reason whatsoever for her to change into anything that could be considered pajamas, but he brought them anyway - two of those loose t-shirts, two of those loose pair of shorts because that was what had been easiest to grab from a looted Walmart only moderately full of walkers - because he wants her to feel human. Eating like refueling, staring dully at a fire, not talking for hours on end - not talking ever until she cracked and made him do so - collapsing into thin unconsciousness in the clothes they wore for days at a stretch, covered in so many layers of grime that it started feeling like a second skin… That wasn't human.

She knew that. She knew it better than anyone. That was why she refused to settle. That was why she demanded more.

So he gets her to wash, gets her to take care of her teeth, gets her to change out of the shirt and jeans she had been wearing. She does all of this with only the barest prompting; she seems to understand what's expected of her now. She goes to her bed without any prompting at all, without a word, and she lies down and curls up facing him and closes her eyes, her face sliding into a smooth nothing-expression different from her usual blankness. He can't tell if she's falling asleep or not, and he doesn't imagine it really matters; he sits down next to her, like before, and he watches her as her breathing slows and the last light of the dying fire stains her skin bright crimson.

After a few moments of silent stillness, he lifts a hand and lays it against the side of her head, combs his fingers through her hair. Her wounded hand is tucked against her chin, the tip of her thumb pressed against her bottom lip.

Her hair needs brushing - it's shorter but it can still tangle. Maybe she'll let him do that, if she won't do it herself. He can get her a brush from the pharmacy, now that he has a better idea of what the situation is down there. He can go back, be more careful. And she should bathe. That might help too. He doesn't know how likely it is that he'll have to push her into that and he's not even remotely prepared to think about it.

He never thought about her like a child. Not really. They never had that option. Even right after the farm, he didn't think about her that way. She was young, she was new to the shit the world had become, but he understands - probably better than most people, or at least it used to be so - that sometimes children stop being children far too early. Sometimes children never get to be children at all. They're walking around in the bodies of children, beaten and burned into old men and women and set into a lifetime of it, regardless of how long that life turns out to be. Carl was a boy, Beth was a girl, but neither of them were children.

She was never a child to him. But he looks at her now and that's all he sees.

This is not how it was supposed to be.

He gets up and goes to the pantry, to the wine rack, grabs a bottle of something without looking at what it is. The crumpled carton containing his last four cigarettes is by his bed; he grabs that too. The clouds are still heavy and low so there's no moon, no stars, and a wind picking up like a storm is on the way, low rumbles so distant they're nearly inaudible. He sits down against the railing, back to it, pushes the cork down the neck of the bottle with the blade of his knife, and smokes and gets slowly and determinedly drunk on what - when he examines it much later - turns out to be Shiraz from a place whose name looks French and which he can't even hope to pronounce.

Smoking. And wine. He doesn't laugh out loud, and he's not laughing on the inside, but he can look at his situation and he can see the logic in the laughing he might be doing, and he can be morbidly glad that he didn't decide to do this in bed.

And anyway, it's stupid. Getting drunk is stupid. Everything is stupid. They're not secure. They're not safe. Nothing here is safe. Everything is a threat. Walkers, bad people, _her…_

Him.

 _Safe_ is a fucking fantasy. So it doesn't matter.

None of it does.

When it starts to rain he grips the top of the railing, hauls himself to his feet, and stumbles to bed.

* * *

When she bled, all the color bled away with her.

Watching it flow out. Every step more and more of it, pouring down the stairs around him like a waterfall. Carried her through it; she was heavy but he had to, _him,_ and he snarled at the people - God, can't even remember who they were - who tried to help him. Tried to _take her,_ he thought. Take her away from him. No. His fault, he didn't grab her, _knew_ something was wrong and didn't grab her and pull her back from the edge, and he'll carry her now down flight after flight of stairs as his penance, and it won't ever be enough because no suffering could ever be sufficient to balance this account.

Out into a world painted in grayscale. There was screaming. He couldn't see for his tears. All that color, stormclouds ahead - it should have rained black blood. Looking down at her, head against his chest - dreaming this, _had been dreaming it since he lost her, fuck, never could have told anyone._ Holding her again. Not like this, though. He's not picky, not difficult to please; _he just wanted her to be alive._

But she is. And it's not dark. He's carrying her through a hall of light, a warm bundle in his arms, breath and pulse and blood-beat. Here, with him. He was wrong. He was wrong about everything.

Everything.

Looking ahead at the dark gleam of polished wood, almost blinded. Every step is slow, even, timed with her heart - she's not heavy. This is so easy. This is so right. Finally, after all this time, he's getting it right.

This should come in threes. That number is special. Magical. Talismanic. He carried her to the little White Trash Brunch he so carefully arranged for her, carried her out of the place that killed her, and now he carries her a third time, thrumming with life, and he carries her with very specific purpose.

He knows what it is. Or he will know. He'll see.

Air caressing his skin, toying with her hair, fresh and cool. Sky sunless and white and brilliant. Trees all around them, the world spread out below. Mountains, graceful rounded peaks rolling into valleys. But no color. No color anywhere. All shades of gray, black shadows sweeping across the world, pale trees like furred fingerbones. Everything before and beneath them looks like the humped backs of sleeping dogs. Wolves. Resting now. They're safe, he's safe up here with her, and when he looks down at her she's dressed all in white like a bride, her face tipped up to his, and she's smiling that sweet little smile and reaching up to touch his mouth.

She's there. She's _her._ All of her, all returned to him. He had faith. He never lost it. He never betrayed her. He never gave up. He never left her behind.

He lifts her above the world and he holds her close and looks at her. Her gray lips move.

 _It's all right._

 _It's better now._

He stands at the edge and opens his arms and watches her fall.

* * *

Agony and screaming.

The agony is his. The screaming isn't. He sits there, dazed, whirling his gaze around, his arm pounding with pain. The rain is drumming on the windows, still no moon and no light to speak of, but he can make out faint outlines, and he can see - across the displaced furniture and the wide expanse of wood floor black as tar - her, her little form writhing and twisting in the sheets, her head snapping back as another scream tears itself out of her throat.

Words in that, somewhere. Something. A distantly removed part of himself processes that; the rest of him is moving, launching out of bed and flying across to her. Edwards said sometimes she had nightmares, said that they were bad, bad enough to really be more like night _terrors,_ and that she would wake up and not be awake at all, still think they were going on, once fighting a girl who was assisting him so hard she sprained the girl's wrists.

But Edwards never specified what the dreams were about. And Daryl didn't ask.

Should have. Just another mistake. He has no idea if it would help now, but it sure as fuck wouldn't hurt.

He slides onto his knees on the mattress next to her, gropes for her. " _Beth._ Beth, it's alright, you're-"

She strikes at him - _claws_ at him, digs her nails into his arm and hisses like an enraged cat, and he yelps at the bright, hot flare of fresh pain and releases her and reels back before he can stop himself. For a fraction of a second her eyes are open, her head and shoulders lifted off the bed, and though there shouldn't be enough light to see it, her eyes are blazing, literally _blazing,_ full of fire.

It can't be possible. But a lot of things aren't possible, and with perverse glee they've gone ahead and happened anyway.

It's just for that tiny sliver of time, but it feels like minutes, her seizing his gaze with hers and holding it, _strangling_ it, and his breath freezes his throat, his mouth hanging open and hands useless at his sides. Then she's back to spasming, her whole spine arched into a bow, and he wonders if she's actually having a seizure - not those little brain hiccups but a real honest-to-Christ _seizure,_ which he has no idea how to handle, when she's suddenly _reaching for him,_ groping at his knees, curling toward him and whimpering.

And all he can do is reach back.

She cringes away when he ignores the lingering burn in his damaged muscle and tries to get his arms around her, and hisses again, fighting just as hard as she's clearly frightened. But she's still scrabbling against his hands with her own hooked fingers, and he does the only thing he can think to do: he takes her hands in his, weaves their fingers together and squeezes. Holds on like he's trying to pull her out of high rushing water, sucking mud, like he's caught her just as she's tumbling off a cliff - _a cliff, falling, oh my fucking God_ \- and she squeezes back so hard she hurts him, their knuckles cracking together.

As he drops onto his side and faces her, she's back to whimpering, tossing her head as if she's trying to evade something that isn't him, trying to keep herself clear, and there's a name lodged in those heartbreaking little sounds. She's saying it over and over - though he doesn't think it's the only word forcing its way free of her throat and her broken brain - and it takes him a moment or two to get it, but he does. He's almost certain.

 _Gorman._

* * *

He doesn't know when she quiets. He only knows that she does, and that's enough.

He thinks it's possible that he actually falls asleep again, for a short period. It's possible that he doesn't. Nothing feels real. It feels like he never stopped dreaming. He knows he was; he doesn't remember much about it other than that it was terrible, and he doesn't _want_ to remember.

Both of them at once, going through that. He's smiling grimly on the inside.

He watches her for a while, watches her breathing as it slows down and softens. Watches the tension slide out of her muscles, the trembling subside. She's rolled onto her side too, head near his, still gripping his hands. He has no desire whatsoever to let her go. Even though the dressings on her bitten fingers have been half torn off, and they should be replaced.

At some point. At some point he'll do that. Right now it doesn't seem as though she's going to do any more damage to herself. Any more damage to him.

His arm is still sobbing weakly but he's barely aware of it.

 _Beth,_ he whispers, and he's not sure why. But as soon as he does her eyes open, and it's only then that he realizes the rain has eased and sunrise is approaching and there's a hint of light bleeding into the sky.

All gray.

"Yes."

"You're…" He hadn't expected her to answer. He doesn't know what to do now. Not that he did before. "Are you alright?"

She just looks at him. She doesn't appear to be blinking. Then, slowly, "What do you think?"

Even less idea what to do than he had already. He swallows, hard. She's still holding onto him. As long as she's holding onto him, talking to him, aware of him and considering him real enough to interact with, things are actually pretty good. Or he hopes so.

Simple. He senses that simple is best here. Simple and true. He takes a breath, and - almost imperceptibly - he shifts closer to her. The room is cool - the fire died down to coals a while ago - but her skin is still dully gleaming with sweat and damp strands of her hair are stuck to her temple and brow.

"I think you're here." He pauses and gives her hands a gentle, careful squeeze. "I think you're safe."

She laughs. It's only a breath, but it's unmistakable, and it's cold. Hard. "You're an idiot."

Yes. "Yeah. I am." Closer. See? Idiot. "But you are. You're safe up here. I swear it, Beth. I swear."

"Don't lie to me."

Not so cold now, nor so hard. Instead there's such a deep sadness, a _heaviness_ in those four words, that he almost can't stand it. Almost can't keep himself away. She sounds like that and all he wants to do is hold her as tight as he can. Pull her into himself, hollow out his fucking ribcage to make a place for her, keep her there, keep away whatever is making her feel like that. When she cried, before, he hated it and he never knew what to do, and he would have done anything if it would have helped her stop. Then he _made_ her cry, or he saw the tears in her eyes even if she didn't let them fall, and he hated himself more than he has ever hated anything.

Then he didn't. For a little while.

"Ain't lyin'." But God, oh God, he is. He's lying to them both and he's doing it with all the determination he can muster, and it's _worse_ than a lie, because part of him - a significant part, the majority - believes that if he lies long enough and hard enough he can make it into something true.

"You are." Still sad. But is that a smile? An awful, twisted smile - he can just see its edge in the gathering dawn. "Do it. I changed my mind. Lie to me, Daryl. Lie all you want."

Then it's her that closes the distance between them, her that shifts roughly forward and into the spoon his body makes, tucking everything up close and pressing against his chest and fitting the top of her head under his chin. She's a little fetal ball, warm and shivering. Her hand curves over the side of his neck and he thinks about her hooking that hand the way she did before, nails in his flesh and gouging deep, cutting into his artery and pumping his blood all over them both.

And he would die, and he would turn, and he would take her.

She's not safe. Not in any sense in which that word could ever be used.

"You're safe," he whispers again, and he wraps her up in his arms.

If she's going to do it, she'll find a way.


	5. and even on our worst days

**Chapter 5: and even on our worst days**

She's not there.

But he knows where she is.

The sheets are still warm with her. _He's_ still warm with her. He lies there for a few moments, curled around the space she occupied when she was with him. The space and the orientation of his body are all the evidence he needs: it happened. It did. It wasn't just another nightmare. It wasn't something less, or more. It was real, as real as anything is. She was lost in the horror of herself but she let him come to her. She let him touch her. Touched _him._ Let him stay.

Let him hold her.

He pulls in a breath. It goes on for a while.

Finally he levers himself up, groaning, turns away from the rising sun hammering against his eyes and skin and head, and takes stock of things.

He hurts. He hurts everywhere. It takes him a few more seconds to remember why - not just the sullen ache in his muscles but the sharper pain along his upper arm; when he looks at it he sees four short gouges crusted with blood. Echo of the hiss she made when she did it to him. Her eyes blazing almost as bright as the sun on his bare back.

 _Gorman._

He looks toward the sliding glass door, and she's out there on the deck, bent over the railing, her hair dancing pale gold in the breeze. He can't see what she's dropping this time, can't hear the sound of it shattering, but the memory of that sound surges up in him, boils its way into his forebrain, and he hears it anyway. Almost musical. A cloud of glass shards glittering in the sun. Her face, her eyes tracking its descent. Her expression. Not quite delight, but...

Something not too distant from that.

He watches her for a while. There's a long interval after the initial release where she doesn't appear to do much of anything. She merely stands there, head bent, staring down with her hands on the top of the rail. He knows how strong she is; he's had very detailed, very up close and personal demonstrations. It would be a simple matter for her to lift herself up and balance there like a carving on an Ancient Greek temple, a little marble nymph in a loose white t-shirt two sizes too big.

Poised in white, suspended over everything. In the cool arms of the wind.

Wind would never hold her up.

 _Neither will you._

For a second he almost shoves himself to his feet and charges for the door, throws it open, rushes her and seizes her and drags her - snarling and clawing at him like a wild thing - back into the house. He's vibrating with it, with wanting to do it. With the certainty that he will.

He does shove himself to his feet. But he doesn't rush her. If she was going to jump, somehow he thinks she already would have. At least today.

Tomorrow is always another story.

* * *

He's pouring syrupy fruit cocktail into a couple of bowls when it occurs to him that they can't keep eating out of cans. Not for much longer. He knew that anyway, was perfectly aware of it and had factored it into both his very specious reasons for coming here and his very general plans regarding what to do when they got here. But he's been distracted. He made that run yesterday and that was good, and he made it _back_ and that was even better, but there are still things he's running the risk of neglecting. Still things he can't afford to let slip through the cracks.

They should have fresh meat, and if he can find fresh greens of any kind, even better.

This is yet another thing he can _do,_ another thing on which he can exert some kind of control, and he won't have to think about how it doesn't make any difference at all.

Today. Today, maybe. If she seems stable enough. He stands in front of the counter and braces himself on it - cool granite, exquisitely polished, so smooth under his hands that it feels almost slick - and he closes his eyes and breathes. He can smell the syrup in the cocktail, awful saccharine with a cutting edge, and it makes his mouth hurt.

If she seems stable enough. That's hilarious. If she seems stable enough it won't mean anything, because yesterday she seemed pretty stable until she started trying to bite her own fingers off.

But it's what he has to go on. And it can't be nothing. It can't be. If he allows it to be nothing, he's already given up. He's already failed her.

He pushes himself away from that gleaming slippery granite and rummages through a drawer for a couple of spoons.

* * *

When she came in yesterday morning from her little ritual - so it seems to be - she seemed almost chipper, and the same is true now. She's moving lightly, easily, as if she's more present in her own body. Her lips are curved into something that could, with some work, become a genuine smile. She's almost - _almost_ \- completely focused.

Of the girl the night before, the girl writhing and screaming as if she was being electrocuted - and the girl after, the girl gone all cold and hard inside and begging him to lie to her and tell her she was safe - there's no sign.

She sits down at the table at the same moment he puts the bowl in front of her, and before he's seated across from her she's already gone to work, feeding the machine, ingesting the calories that will keep her running with her eyes half closed and barely a pause to chew. It's fruit cocktail; it's a bowl of mushy things that used to be fruit floating around in sugar. She basically doesn't _have_ to chew.

He's not that surprised to discover that it doesn't even really disturb him anymore, how she does it. If anything she's rubbing off on him. He doesn't want to taste what he's eating anyway, but even if he did he's not sure he'd be able to get much out of that particular realm of sensory input.

She's right. It's all just calories.

They've both been here. Maybe that's why it's easy.

* * *

He cleans up. He cleans the scratches on his arm. He looks at himself in the mirror for a long moment.

He considers asking her about Gorman.

He considers it for about ten seconds and dismisses it out of hand. It doesn't take genius-level reasoning to conclude that _Gorman,_ whatever or whoever that is, isn't a place he wants her to go back to. Not if he wants to have a prayer of being able to handle her for the rest of the day, and he's still hoping she'll be steady enough for him to rationalize at least a couple hours of hunting.

He was gone for an hour yesterday and she was fine. She had even made some progress on her own, if what she scrawled across page after page of the journal was _progress -_ and he's more than prepared to consider it that. Hell, maybe him leaving her alone for a while is a _good_ thing.

But there are things he needs to take care of first. Things with her.

She's gone back to the sofa with _The Secret Garden_ and is curled up at one end, legs drawn in close. Once again she seems to be shrinking into her t-shirt, and as he comes toward her his attention locks oddly on a scab on the top of her left knee. Nothing self-inflicted, as far as he can tell; it looks as if she took a fall, skinned it - hardly at all. Just the kind of minor thing that might happen for any number of perfectly innocuous reasons.

But there's something about it that makes him abruptly and profoundly uneasy. And he's fucked if he knows why.

He crouches in front of her, takes a chance and touches her knee - lays his hand over the scab, slightly rough against his palm. She lifts her gaze from the book and looks at him, eyes huge and dark and awful, surrounded by a pale, scarred face he's finding difficult to look at.

Sometimes he can deal with her scars and sometimes they break him open. And then there are the times that fall right in between.

He meets those soul-boring eyes and keeps his own steady. Somehow.

"You should get a shower."

She cocks her head. "Why?"

"'cause we been here almost four days and you ain't had one since we left." Four days. To remind her, give her some kind of context for this. To try to moor her in _some_ way to the time through which she's moving.

To moor himself. Because if he's honest, he's starting to feel slightly unmoored.

She shifts her gaze away from him again - down to the page in front of her. He's being dismissed. "Doesn't matter."

"It does matter."

"It _doesn't._ " She jerks her head up, teeth bared, and just for a sliver of a second he sees that girl again, the one with blazing eyes, the one who hissed and snarled and tore at his arm, and who might have torn out his throat if she wanted to. "You stupid _fucking_ idiot, it doesn't matter, when are you going to _get_ that?"

It's the word that throws him. Not her tone, not her expression, not the content of what she's saying. The word, that one word he says countless times a day, and can't think of a single time he's ever heard it pass her lips.

It shouldn't shake him. It does. It shakes him to his bones.

"'cause you're dead?" he says softly.

"You still don't believe me."

"I can see you breathin'.

"You're seeing what you wanna see."

"I can _feel_ it, Beth." All at once he's frantic, and it's _quiet,_ contained, a tight coil of desperation winding tighter and tighter around the clenched fist of his heart. He lifts his hand from her knee and reaches for her wrist, catches it, holds it, and she sucks in a hard breath and tugs but not as hard as she would if she was really intent on fighting him, and it knots his throat and he couldn't let go of her even if he tried.

He holds her wrist, turns it upward. He can see it. She can see it. Her left wrist, naked. She didn't bring any bracelets with her. She didn't bring any jewelry at all. It's all gone, left behind when they ran. All her pretty things, everything she held onto in the middle of so much ugliness, just gone.

But now there's this.

"It's right here." He lays his thumb over the fine blue tracery of her veins, over the thin white line that slashes across them. Beneath it a flutter, running and tumbling over itself - he thinks of a little bird in a cage far too small. "I can feel it. You can too. You gonna tell me that ain't real?"

"You didn't feel it before."

He can't breathe.

In his mind, he falls back before her. He cringes, crumples inward; there's no possible way his bones can continue to support him, hollow as they are. Those five words, she had to find them and _use_ them, and he didn't even know she knew. Didn't know she had any idea. If Edwards told her. Or if she somehow _remembers_ , and he can't even think about that. _Oh my girl, please, no. No, no, no. Please don't. Please._

He knew she was violent. He knew she was dangerous. He didn't know she was cruel.

"Beth-"

"You left me." Chipped ice. Eyes, voice. She pulls her wrist free and he releases her with nerveless fingers, and somehow she manages to inject the full weight and force of all her contempt into a single tilt of her head. "I was dead, so you left me. So I'm dead now. So it doesn't matter." She looks down at the book again, arms wrapped around herself. "Get the fuck away from me."

He doesn't move. He's not disobeying her; he can't. He literally can't. He stares at her, and he would swear that yes, yes: his heart is no longer beating.

 _There was more. Why don't you remember the rest of it? They practically had to drag me away, almost dislocated my fucking arms, and I was screaming. I would have stayed with you. I would have. I didn't care, I would have stayed._

"I didn't want to," he whispers, and it has all the life of a drought wind.

"But you did."

She doesn't look up. She doesn't say anything else. At last he manages to find his feet, turns, walks away from her into light so bright it burns his eyes.

Except that's not really why they're burning.

* * *

He goes out on the deck and he leans over, looks down at that rough gray jut where he saw the glass explode. It's glittering now, and it wasn't before. Various parts of the cliff face directly below possess that kind of glitter, faint but unmistakable. Lingering glass dust from where the things pulverized themselves. He stares until the reason for the burning in his eyes transfers from what happened back in there to what he's seeing now, and the wind rushing up and drying him out.

She was happy when she came in after doing this. Happy, after her fashion: Happy in the only vague way she seems to be capable of now. It made her happy to watch these pretty things destroyed - and they _are_ pretty, or they were; even if he doesn't like them, even if they make him uneasy, to someone they probably _were_ pretty and he can see how someone would think so. Black and cold and shiny like beetles but graceful and swooping, clean lines, darkly elegant.

She breaks these things and she takes a great deal of satisfaction in it, and he doesn't understand why but he thinks about her cruelty, the cruelty he now knows is there, and he fights back a shiver.

Then he realizes there's no reason to do so and he goes ahead and shivers. Across the chasm, unseen and some immeasurable distance away, a bird screams. A raptor. Bird of prey. Something big.

Something lethal.

She didn't want to hurt him because he was some vague unnamed and faceless threat, or because he was in her way and he was of no consequence. She wanted to hurt him because he's _him,_ and she knows him, and she knows exactly where all his softnesses are, his unprotected underbelly, and she knows exactly where and how to stab.

She has so much ammunition. He gave her so much. He spent days upon days giving her weapons she could use against him if she wanted to. He willingly put them in her hands. He disarmed. He did this because he trusted her more than he has ever trusted anyone and because he _had_ to, because it was that or endless cold war - not with everyone else but with himself.

He gave her his arsenal because he believed without question that she would never turn the guns on him.

He's an idiot.

And if he had it to do over again, knowing what he does now, he wouldn't change a thing.

* * *

But all at once - no idea how much later, he gazed down at the rock until his eyes slipped out of focus and the wind massaged his skin into cool numbness - she's there behind him, touching his arm, and he jerks and has a sudden vision of her grabbing him with astonishing and yet not unexpected strength and shoving him over the railing to break on the rocks, her last thing destroyed.

He turns, breathing hard and trying not to - trying not to let her see it if he can't stop himself - and she's looking up at him with perfect, level placidity, her eyes wide and expression flat in a way he now recognizes as her normal baseline, the midpoint from which she moves up or down. The coldly vicious girl who sent him out here is gone.

Except she's not. She's in there. She's crouched, coiled, waiting for another chance to strike at him.

"The water's too cold."

He blinks at her, completely nonplussed. It seems like a total non sequitur, floating in midair unattached to anything she's said or will say. She looks back at him and appears to be waiting for something, nothing else to offer. She doesn't even seem that invested. The words are his to pick up or leave there.

But then he gets it. And his heart rockets into his throat, because it means she put the book down and got off that fucking couch and she at least _tried_ for him. She didn't do it but she went up to the bathroom and she gave it a shot. And now that he looks at her, the edges of one side of her hair are the slightest bit dark. Damp. She leaned in to test the water and she didn't like it, so she stopped.

That's okay. That's absolutely fucking okay; for now he'll consider himself more than satisfied.

"Water heater ain't workin'."

"It's too cold," she repeats, shaking her head. "I can't."

As if she wants him to fix it, make it so she can.

He scrambles, flails around for an idea like he's backed into a corner and needs to come up with a way out or he'll be eaten alive. He can't just leave it there after all; he needs to _do_ something about it, because every chance like this he gets is endlessly precious.

Heat. Yes.

"What about if you did it in front of the fire?"

She cocks her head - _little_ _brain-damaged bird_ \- clearly confused.

"Tonight," he says gently. "I'll get a fire goin', get you a towel and some water, you can wash off in front of it. Where it's warmer. Better'n nothin'."

It sounds pathetic in his own ears. Wheedling. But she frowns slightly, looks thoughtful - and finally nods.

"Okay."

Okay.

He tears his eyes away from her, glances back at the world. The sun is high; it's just after noon. This is a chance, yes, maybe a good one. Take advantage. Miss it and you might not get another one for a while. Christ, he wants to believe she's getting better, and maybe she even _is,_ but he can't let himself. Can't throw that much of himself into the certainty beyond hoping.

If he does he drops his guard even more than he already has.

"I'm gonna go huntin'. That alright?"

No hesitation. She nods again. But she's also not focused on him anymore, and as he watches she steps past him to the railing and lays her hands on the smooth dark wood. Like before, like the morning, the wind lifts her hair and the sun pours into it, bathes her face and neck and arms in a glow that seems to shimmer, and she's not a Greek nymph but an angel carved into a cathedral pillar, distant and unearthly and so beautiful that all at once he wants to drop to his knees.

"I thought I'd get wings," she murmurs. "After. I thought we'd all get wings and fly up to God. Isn't that stupid? But I did. All those pictures, all that bullshit in Sunday School. We'd all be together again. Jesus handin' out hugs like Santa Claus. Smug asshole."

It's _her,_ her soft, sweet voice, but once again the words aren't her at all and they burn into him, sizzle through his eardrums. On their worst days together, starving and exhausted and sick to numbness with loss, she never talked like this. _He_ did, when he talked at all, and she made him want to stop even if he couldn't.

 _Please don't. Girl, please._

"Thought I'd get wings," she says, echoing out over the sheer cut of stone and the trees falling away below. "You already had them and they didn't save you. You're here with me. Probably wouldn't have mattered." She closes her eyes. "I knew you'd go to Hell, everything you've done."

Striking. Striking like a viper, digging in her fangs and pumping her venom, and he stands there beside and behind her with his eyes and ears and skin on fire and he takes it. How she's softly, gently, sweetly tearing him apart, because she can.

"At least you're with me," she whispers, lids still delicately closed, her lashes long against the ridge of bone beneath her eye. "At least I'm not alone."

"You're not alone," he breathes, echoes with hers, and he has no idea how the fuck he says anything at all.

"No." She swings back to him, sudden and swift, eyes open and hooking cool blue barbs into his. "If you're goin' huntin', I'm goin' with you."

 _But._ Inside his head he stumbles back, pressing against the rear wall of his cranium. No. Of course she would want that - he left her behind last time, and she accepted it and she didn't hurt herself, at least not while he was gone, but he could tell she wasn't happy about it. Probably for a whole multitude of hopelessly complex reasons that not even she fully understands.

He can't tell her no. But.

"You sure?" He shifts his feet, unable to keep back the unease. She would see it anyway, she could always see through him and he has every reason to know that's still the case. "I mean... You think you can-"

"I'm goin' with you or I'm cuttin' my wrists open," she says calmly. "And when you get back you'll have all that blood to clean up. Is that what you want?"

Not that she'll be dead. Of course she's not threatening that. In her mind, a dead girl's mind, she's merely threatening massive inconvenience. But it makes no fucking difference; she knew she would have him with that, pin him to the fucking wall like a bug, and she does and she has.

She's getting better, sure, maybe. Getting sharper, less helpless. He still looks at her and sees a child, hates it, wants to claw that vision out of himself because it's so wrong and it's so unworthy of her, but he can't _just_ see a child, whatever else happens. Because if she's getting sharper, and that cruelty is in her, she'll know exactly how to hurt him instead of herself, and she won't need to do it with weapons or teeth or fingernails.

All she'll need to do is talk.

He thought he would be able to keep trying to save her even if she was trying to kill him. He actually thought that. He was actually that stupid. That unimaginative. And he was getting all grimly self-satisfied down there in the town about how many people have been killed by their own lack of imagination.

He thought he would be able to keep trying to save her and he fucking will.

Well.

He will not under any circumstances give her a gun. But in that pack, the one he's hidden, is something else, the one thing in there that he desperately hoped he would be able to pull out and use, because he never thought he would ever get the chance. Thought he would bear that burden until the world finally sent him to her.

He steps away from her and turns, nods toward the door - standing open. "Alright. But you're gonna need somethin'. C'mon."

Not how he wanted to do this. Not how he would ever, _ever_ have wanted to do it. But he will and he'll drag whatever he can out of it, because she's here and alive and even if she doesn't believe she is, her pulse thrums strong and hot under his fingers when he touches her.

He can give this back to her, and he doesn't have to carry it any longer. And if she chooses to use it like he fears she will, it still won't matter, because if she's going to do it, if she's going to fucking do it, if she's really _that determined..._

She'll find a way.

* * *

He has her wait on the sofa while he goes to the pantry. This, one of his weird, semi-pointless fumblings at an attempt to keep some kind of bad joke of a handle on _safety_ \- not letting her see where he's hidden it. And really, he thinks as he bends and wedges his hand between the wine rack and the far wall, grabs the pack and pulls it free, it's not even about the gun. It's not about that at all. Not about any of what she might do with any of what's in there.

She's insane but she's not stupid. She'll see them - the drugs, the syringes, the restraints and the rope - and she'll know instantly why he has them. What they're for.

And if she trusts him at all now, she never will again.

None of that matters. He can lie to himself - he's so good at it - and tell himself that none of it will be necessary. He lays the pack down and kneels on the cold floor in front of it, unzips it.

It's right that he should kneel for this. For what he lifts out and holds in his hands. Cradles. Gently, lovingly.

Because for over half a year it was all he had of her.

He took it off after it became clear what he and Aaron were dealing with. It didn't seem like a good idea to keep wearing it, like it might set her off somehow in a way none of them would be able to control - or that was what he told himself. That was the more comfortable reason. The real one - he suspects - is that he took it off because he simply couldn't keep it on. Couldn't do it. Keep a dead girl's knife on his belt when she was right in front of him, breathing and warm and insisting that she was still dead.

So he kept it. Because he was going to give it back to her, when she was well. He was going to go to her and she would know him and she would know herself, and he would give it to her and not have to say anything - that he kept it for her, that he would have kept it forever and he's so, so glad he doesn't have to keep it anymore - and she would take it from him and look at him, understand everything he wasn't saying, smile at him. Touch his face with her smooth, cool fingers.

 _Thank you._

He closes his hands around the knife's soft, worn sheath and squeezes his eyes shut.

This is not how it was supposed to be.

* * *

But it is how it is.

He comes back to her, across the room, stops in front of her and looks down, the knife at his side. She looks up at him, blinking slowly. Docile again. Calm. Almost bovine.

He's not fooled for a fucking second. It might not be affected, what he's seeing. Might be genuine. He doesn't want to believe that she has enough guile and enough mad shrewdness to purposefully trick him like that. But that cruel girl, that _viper_ \- she's still down there. At some point between yesterday and this morning, that girl woke up, and he doesn't think she's going back to sleep. He senses that she intends to stick around.

This isn't what he's heard termed _multiple personalities._ At least, he doesn't think so. She's aware of what goes on, on some level, all the time. Every single one of these girls is _Beth_. But she's fragmented. She's been shattered. And he can't be sure of anything anymore.

All he can do is hold on.

He drops into a crouch in front of her and holds up the knife, handle and tip balanced on his fingers. He doesn't speak - doesn't and _can't_ , gaze frozen on her face - and she stares at it, no sign of comprehension in those wide, glassy eyes.

Then she blinks again and something _clicks_ back there, and she takes it in her hand, curls her fingers around it, unsheathes it. Turns it, her suddenly sharp attention moving up and down the blade.

"Mine," she whispers, and he gasps. Can't help it. Can't help anything. He clenches his hands into trembling fists, and there's no indication at all that she's even aware of him anymore.

She runs a fingertip up the edge and he's sure he's going to see blood well. But none does.

Her focus snaps back to him, still sharp. "For hunting?"

He nods. He can do that. He can nod and he can talk and he can adopt the pretense of being a functional human being capable of communicating with other human beings. He can do so very convincingly. He's had over a year of practice.

"You ain't goin' out there unarmed."

"I'll be safe."

"I'll be with you. I'll keep you safe."

"I don't need you to keep me safe." She's looking at the knife again, thoughtful, pressing the point lightly against the pad of her thumb. "I'm the thing everythin' else is afraid of."

He has nothing to say to that. He knows what she means and he doesn't want her to clarify, doesn't want to hear it again, but he also can't argue. He _is_ afraid. He's terrified of her, _of_ her and _for_ her, so unbearably and monstrously afraid.

But he does have something to say. Because this isn't how it was supposed to be, _none_ of this is how it was supposed to be, but she also wasn't supposed to be _alive_ and whatever else is going on in the scatter of jagged glass shards that is her mind, she _is_ alive and she's _right here_ and last night she let him hold her. Reached for him and held on, and when he curled his arms around her she settled against him and slept. Warm. Breathing, heart beating.

She's not dead. She's alive. That's all that matters.

"I kept it for you," he whispers. "After. Carol gave it to me. I kept it. Beth, I..." And that's all he has.

He never expected to have to say anything at all.

She's looking at him. Still holding the knife - fingers now wrapped around the handle - but looking at _him,_ clear and present and impossible to read. He meets that beautiful, terrible gaze as long as he can and then he drops his eyes away, face briefly twisting, knowing that she'll see and knowing that if she wants to strike at him he just rolled over and exposed his throat and belly, and he sharpened her fangs.

Touch on his face, his cheek. Smooth, cool. He shudders, sudden and hard, and jerks his eyes back up to her. And she's looking down at him, fingers stroking across the ridge of his cheekbone, and all he wants in this world or any fucking other is to lower his head into her lap and sob.

She knows. _Oh God, she knows._

"Thank you," she says softly, lays the knife down and frames his face with her gentle, merciful hands, tilts his head up and leans in and presses her lips to his brow.

And when he gives up and lets the tears come, shaking in her hands, she carefully wipes them away.


	6. from the slippery hands

**Chapter 6: from the slippery hands to the line of your throat**

All at once it's hot.

Not as hot as it's been. Not as hot as it could be, not as hot as so many of their days together before those days ended, when they slogged through the woods and across fields and alongside roads before they turned away again. He remembers the sweat was endless, the _air_ was sweat - they swam through it and the only relief they got was rain and the occasional cooler night, and the times when they found a body of water large enough and clean enough to bathe in. _Bathe_ being a very generous term for what they did. It was barely rinsing. Fast, very cursory, done as soon as they could. Taking turns taking watch. Moments of intense vulnerability that had to be as few in number as possible.

Never entirely naked. He never wanted her to see him. Tried to trust her to look away, tried to tell himself that she would, she wouldn't see the scars, she wouldn't think about them and wonder and maybe, some night when something broke in her, ask him about them.

She never did. And it doesn't matter now.

He never looked at her. His stomach twisted when - once, briefly - he thought about doing so. Not even that he wanted to, not that it was an _urge_ , just... The possibility occurred to him. That he might. That she might not see him doing it. That he might get away with it.

He thought about it and it felt bad, wrong, so he didn't think about it again.

And now it's hot. He leads her out the front door and out toward the road, crossbow slung across his back - the space up here is small, far too small to accommodate any real game, only the house and the overgrown garden surrounding it, and a few hundred yards or so of trees before it all drops sharply away into a slope too steep and rocky for most things to climb. The road is the only way up or down that's at all practical, and further down the ground off the road will level out a bit, the slopes ease, and they'll be able to cover some of it. There might be deer. Rabbits. Squirrels could be anywhere, but he'd rather do better than squirrel if that's possible.

She follows him in silence, and again he thinks of that time.

It's almost comfortable.

About a quarter of a mile down, she's still trailing him, and he pauses and looks back and waits for her. It's not that he thinks she's going to wander off, not exactly, but if she's coming along he's for damn sure going to keep her in sight.

Knife at her belt. He can't stop looking at it.

They stayed there for a little while, no more than about ten minutes, and when she released him and he looked up at her she had gone blank again. Stared dully at him like she had said nothing, done nothing, like he had simply given her the knife and that had been that. Which the more realistic parts of him had expected. So he scrubbed his face with his hand and stood up, shook himself, put it all away.

But it was something, that moment with her. Another few minutes and it didn't even feel real, didn't feel like it happened at all. But it _did_ , and it was _something_ , and when he picked up the bow and she came to him dressed with her boots on, slid the knife smoothly onto her belt, that was something as well.

She has it. He doesn't have to carry it anymore. So regardless of the heat and the fact that he senses something in her has left him, he feels light.

"You gotta stick close," he says quietly when she reaches him, and she glances up at him. There's no clear sign of comprehension anywhere to be seen there, and he's wondering if she even registered the words, but then she nods - once, slowly, and he nods back and tries not to be too obviously relieved.

And if he's honest... It feels better having her with him. Maybe it's not safe, but the house isn't safe either, _nothing_ is safe, and at least this way he knows. What she's doing. What's happening. He doesn't have any more control like this, but it feels like he does.

All these little somethings.

It's quiet for a while - quiet between them, and that's also familiar, and not just from the last few days. When they were together before there wasn't much talking. Even after things got better there wasn't a whole lot of it, and when there was she did most of it. But like this, her walking beside him and the endlessly varied calls of mockingbirds echoing through the trees and off exposed rock, the lower coos of the mourning doves, wind in the leaves and stirring the branches, he can almost take himself back there. Pretend nothing changed. Pretend they stayed together and she was never taken, and they never found the others, and it was just them. Just kept being that way.

That would have been just fine.

"How long were we out there?"

He jerks his head up, attention yanked back to her. Because she's said anything at all, because it came out of nowhere and cut through what was admittedly becoming an actual honest-to-God fantasy and a fairly vivid one, but mostly because once again it sounds like _her,_ like the closest he's heard yet to the Beth he lost, and in fact it's so intense that for a few vertiginous seconds he thinks maybe everything else was the fantasy, that they really _did_ stay together, that everything after that night... Nightmare, hallucination, alternate universe, _whatever,_ not real. Never real.

Then he focuses on her face, on the scars slashed across it and on the little pale starburst in her brow, and he knows.

But she still spoke. She still asked him.

"Out where?" He knows that too, or he's fairly sure he does, but she's talking and he wants her to talk _more._

"You know. After the prison. How long?"

He shakes his head. "Never knew."

"A week? Two?"

"Coulda been." It was all just days. Day after day after day, every single one the same, until something changed and none of them were the same anymore, and then... He just hadn't known. Could have been three weeks for all he recalls. Could have been a month. He was with her for a while. That's all he's ever been sure of when it comes down to time. _A while_.

"I don't remember." She sounds distant, but not because she's going away. She sounds distant in the way people do when they're _trying_ to remember. "I just... It felt like a long time."

"Yeah, it did."

"I remember..." She tilts her head back and looks up at the sky - a hard steel blue - and he watches her, watches her face, this face he sometimes feels like he hardly knows and other times can't bear to look at because the sheer force of his knowing is like a fist in his gut. "There was this moment... I dunno if it was a moment. Maybe it took a while. But I sorta... It wasn't like I stopped _wantin'_ to find the others. I mean, I thought we _would_ find 'em. Eventually. Maggie and Glenn, and Rick and Carl and Judith. Michonne. Tyreese and Sasha. Bob. Everyone. I didn't worry about it. But I... I didn't _worry_ about it. Y'know?"

She turns her gaze on him and it's almost too much. Because she's very close to smiling - faint and dreamy but so much _her_ \- and he never thought he would see that smile again.

"I was okay with how things were. It was alright. Just... Just bein' out there. With you."

He swallows, very hard, and manages a nod. But no words. God, no fucking words at all, how the fuck is he ever supposed to speak again. How is he supposed to walk now, to move. To breathe.

He can't just get her back. It can't be that easy.

"What happened to them?"

"I. They." Somehow. Somehow words. He ducks his head, looks down, looks away, looks at anything but her. She's asking, she _cares enough to ask,_ but he has no idea how he's supposed to tell her. What he's supposed to say.

What she'll say when he does.

"Found 'em. We... We went north. DC, almost. Found a place." He shrugs. _And here are the names of the dead. Here are the people you'll never see again, truly never see again, and it was all for nothing_. "Safe. I guess." For a given value of _safe_.

She nods, once again slow. Thoughtful. And for a while she's quiet again and he's ready to let it lie, at least for the present - in significant part because he's not sure what else to ask her. Not sure what else to say. His throat is tight and his mouth is working slightly, everything tense and also so close to tumbling, falling apart, when she says the next thing and slashes the lungs out of him.

"How did you die?"

It takes him a long moment to figure out what she's just asked him. She doesn't fill that moment. She lets it be, waits for him to fill it himself. She still seems very calm and now a little distracted, watching two squirrels chase each other through the branches overhead, screeching and hissing, and he simply circles the question and gapes at it, as flatly bewildered as she's ever been since he brought her up here.

But then.

 _I knew you'd go to Hell, everything you've done._

 _At least you're with me._

"I didn't."

"Yes, you did. You're here."

"I didn't, Beth."

She shakes her head and shoots him a look that's more pitying than anything else. "Why're you lying to yourself like this? Why don't you just accept it?"

His jaw tightens even more. Hurts. "'cause it ain't true."

"Maybe we never made it out of the prison." She looks back at the road, brow furrowed. Again, merely thoughtful. "Maybe that was when it happened."

"We made it out."

"How are you so sure?"

"'cause I _fuckin' am_."

It takes him a few seconds to realize he's stopped, another to realize he's grabbed her by the wrist, yet another to realize he was very close to shouting at her. She's staring up at him with dim surprise. He blinks, wavers, sucks in air and stares down at her slim wrist in his hand, his hold so tight his knuckles have gone pale. He has to be hurting her. But she's just standing there.

His hand spasms open and he nearly recoils, as if she's burned him - and she has. His palm stings. Her wrist is pale where he was gripping it - pale in the prints of his fingers. Then, as he watches, the blood rushes back in and the outlines darken.

And he knows - without having to wait to see it - that he's bruised her.

He never did that before. Even at the shack, even what he did then... He didn't leave a mark on her. Not that she ever let him see.

She stares down at her wrist, her expression all vague puzzlement. She's not angry. She doesn't seem to be in any pain whatsoever. She just doesn't understand.

He almost stumbles back. Almost falls. He never said he was sorry, is the thing. Never said it. Tried to say it so many other ways, tried to show her every day, but _I'm sorry_ never felt like enough, felt like it would be an _insult,_ so he never did. He hoped - God, he believed, he did - that she knew he was.

And he told himself he would never do anything like that to her again. Never so much as raise his voice to her. He told himself that. Made himself swear, over and over. Made himself swear on all the names of the people he still believed were dead, because he knew there wasn't a god in Heaven and nothing else to swear by. Nothing else that meant anything.

He swore, and even as he's watching her now, he'd swear he can see the bruise forming.

"Beth..."

Rustling in the undergrowth behind him, and her head snaps up, everything about her sharpening into almost bestial alertness, razor edged. Daryl is already half-turning, the horror he's just committed briefly and mercifully forgotten, and he's about to draw the bow and investigate when she tears past him, moving with alarming speed, her strides long and graceful and her hair flying around her head, her knife unsheathed and winking in the sun. He opens his mouth to tell her to _fucking stop, I told you-_ and then she's gone into the trees.

More rustling further in the distance. Could be small. Could be large. The sound is getting thrown around and it's difficult to tell.

Cursing lavishly, battling fear and despair and weariness so deep it almost overwhelms the first two, he swings the bow heavily into his hands and follows her.

* * *

He doesn't know how long they were out there together. What he did learn - and he learned it quickly - was that she's fast. Faster than you'd think to look at her. And one would probably assume a considerable degree of speed just looking at her legs. Their relative length. Their power. She runs, leaps and bounds through the shrubs and trees, dodging and almost dancing over roots and uneven patches of ground. The slopes have gentled but they're still slopes, and she's running parallel along the drop, little flashes of her through the trunks and dappled light, arms pumping. Chasing... He doesn't know what. Faster than a walker, anyway. Faster and, he's almost positive, larger than just about any walker would be.

He slings the bow back over his shoulder and keeps pace behind her, slightly higher up. She's swifter than he is, but she's a sprinter. She'll tire. He can just keep going. She's not making any effort to hide her trail. If he loses sight of her, it should be easy enough to track her.

He bruised her and now he's thinking about hunting her like an animal.

This is going _great_ so far.

"Beth!" Probably does no good to call to her. Probably wouldn't even reach her; she wouldn't have run at all if she was fully with him. But he calls anyway, and the name rakes across his throat like he's already been running for miles.

She doesn't so much as glance in his direction.

But there's a flash of white in the distance, and he can see what she saw and what she's chasing: deer, white tailed, bounding along at a speed that should have been too much for her to match. But she is, and it takes him only another couple of seconds to see why: those bounds are uneven. The deer - a small doe - is injured already. Limping. Now and then it stops and wobbles, takes a few uncertain steps, runs again.

At this pace she might actually catch it before she exhausts herself.

"Beth, _stop_."

But should she? Should she stop? His brain is the same panting chaos as the rest of him, scrambling and unable to focus or process anything except what's right in front of him and what it might mean in the next few minutes, but some part of it is still removed and retaining enough higher-level reasoning to see her and think about what's happened and what it's been like and consider the possibility that this is exactly the kind of thing she needs.

Running. Sun, air, her body being used and used well. Being fully _in_ herself, in the moment she occupies. Running like she could before - and even when the days were bad and they were running for all the wrong reasons, she was so beautiful when she ran.

She's so beautiful now.

So he stops calling her. He just pursues, watches her, watches the deer, feels his _own_ body, the pump of his blood and the flex of his muscles - the pain in his arm nowhere near as bad as he had feared, though it's sure as hell not comfortable - how he's _also_ here, sun on his face and arms, the cooler rush of air drying the sweat on his skin, the breath in his lungs. His heart.

He didn't die. He made it. She has to see. She has to see now.

Walkers don't run.

Further down the slope and it's continuing to flatten out, but the ground is also becoming more treacherous - it's clear that this area is subject to considerably more erosion, and protruding rocks are scattered everywhere, lifted roots waiting to hook a foot and wrench or break an ankle. He has to slow, has to watch his footing, but so does Beth - and so does the deer, and he knows it's going to happen seconds before it does.

The deer attempts a leap across a jagged stone line, fails to get enough height, strikes its leg against the edge with a crack - bizarrely loud - and crumples with a rough honking cry, thrashing in the leaves. Beth is barely yards away, slowing, knife up and shining, little predator ready to make a kill.

And the walker staggers out from behind the tree.

Long strings of slimy brown hair, face half hanging off the skull and eyes rolling. Tongue lolling. It should go for the deer, it should go for the easier prey, God, it should, that's what's going to save her because he's struggling to get the bow into his hands and it's so much harder than it should be, his fingers abruptly thick and clumsy, he's too slow, he's too fucking _slow_ but _the deer,_ the deer will-

The walker wavers, hissing, turns and seems to consider something, and begins shambling toward Beth.

All of this happens in a fraction of a second. He still doesn't have the bow up. He's still running. He can't get good aim while running. Beth has skidded to a stop, staring, head slightly cocked and knife lowered, and the walker is less than three feet away from her.

Two.

He's going to watch her die all over again, and this time she isn't coming back.

He screams, and it's wordless and horrible, like it's him about to be ripped apart except if he was he knows he wouldn't scream at all, would just let go under it, and just as he's ready to stop and aim anyway and take down the thing that killed her, Beth snaps the knife up and buries it in the walker's eye and jerks it free.

The thing falls with a gurgle and lies still. And she merely stands, knife still raised, head cocked again, and he knows without being able to make out her expression that she's once more merely puzzled.

He does stop. Has to. Stops and drops the bow, bends over his knees, carves breaths out of the air. Nausea rocks him, grabs his head and feet and wrings him out - sheer terror, sheer and awful helplessness, because maybe he can't save her. Maybe he never could.

Maybe she has to save herself.

* * *

He gets her to help him carry the deer back.

It is, again, not a large deer, and it could be a much bigger ordeal, and it doesn't go quickly or easily but he's thankful at least that she's there. He went to her after, went to her and tried not to grab her by the arms, shake her, shout at her again, pull her against him and hold on so tight her bones ground together. Instead he put an arrow through the twitching deer's skull, turned to her, told her he needed her to help him.

 _Needed her._

She gazed silently up at him, and he could see she was sufficiently _there_ to understand.

Together they lifted the carcass and began to haul it out of the woods.

He's doing a lot of thinking as they approach the road, none of it along pleasant lines. They're fairly far down from the house - a good couple of miles - and it was just the one; since they got here he's seen almost no walkers at all except the ones in town, and the vast majority of them appeared to be locked into the inexplicable pen behind the grocery store. Unless they finally pushed the fence down in their eagerness to get at him, they're still there.

He doesn't want to, but he should go down and verify, from as much of a distance as he can.

Just the one. And nearer the house the ground is almost impassable except for the road. The house isn't particularly secure in and of itself, but the location...

But. Even one. Even _one_.

He keeps being a fucking idiot. He's going to get both of them killed. There are any number of things that could do that, but at this rate it's going to be specifically him.

They're soaked with sweat and his arm is back to shrieking pain by the time they reach the house, and he calls a halt and drops the deer in the drive right in front of the door. Not ideal. Really, really not fucking ideal. But nothing is ideal, and he doesn't have time to get to dressing the thing now.

He has another job to do, and it can't wait.

He does take her by the shoulders - doesn't grab. Careful. Gentle as he can be, tired and hurting and freaked out as he is. He lays his hands on her, frames her, and she looks up at him with her wide, blue, calm gaze, and he wonders if she even knows what she did.

He tries very hard to not look at her wrist.

"I gotta go back to town. Alright? You understand what I'm saying?"

Her brows knit and he can already tell that yes, she _does_ understand, and she's about to demand that he take her along, but he keeps going. Runs right over her. Because he thinks he understands a little of it now, what's driving her when it comes to this, and even if she threatened to open her veins over it, it doesn't originate in the place that's certain she's dead.

It comes from the place that wants to stay alive.

He can take it. Hold onto it. Manipulate it. Manipulate _her_.

And it makes him feel like a piece of shit.

"I need you to stay here. I know you don't wanna, and I don't wanna leave you, but I need that. I still need you, I gotta get in and out fast and I'll do that better if it's just me. When I get back, I'm gonna need your help, and we're gonna have to move fast then too. I can't do this without you." He gives her a little squeeze. "Alright?"

She hesitates, her face a frowning mask of displeasure. But at last she nods, and everything in him loosens the slightest bit.

Unless her mind collapses in the most utterly complete way possible, she'll still be here when he gets back, and all her blood will still be pumping through her veins.

"Alright." But he doesn't let go of her. Not right away. He just looks at her - her hair windblown around her face, her cheeks and neck still flushed with effort, her skin glistening and shirt sticking to her. Revealing the lines of her body, revealing how much thinner she is than when he last saw her - and she was thin then. And she's so strong and she's so fragile, and he releases her shoulders and cups her burning face in his hands.

 _Girl, I won't leave you. No matter what you do to me. Not ever. You could cut my fucking heart out and eat it in front of me and I would still never leave you._

She does nothing. Just looks at him. But her eyes aren't flat - all at once it's as if they spring from two dimensions to three, and it's so sudden it almost unbalances him, almost tosses his hands away. She always saw him like this, so clear. Before. He hated it and then he thought maybe he loved it and now he has no idea. He has no idea what she's seeing.

Maybe he shouldn't be doing this. Touching her now. Maybe this isn't right.

Because there's that line. He doesn't know what it is or why it's there but it's there and he's standing right in the edge of it, and a part of him he's barely cognizant of is whispering that if he steps across it there won't be any going back.

Ever.

She raises her hands and covers his. They're small, soft as they were on his face back in the house, in what feels like another lifetime, and against all sense they're cool. Cool and dry.

There are some things he could say. If he had any idea what the fuck they were.

"I'll be back in an hour." He takes a breath and slides his hands out from under hers. "Swear. An hour." He steps back, clenching, releasing, taking whatever just happened and shoving under the pile of rocks it feels like his bones have become. When he allowed himself to slip into this - something like this - down there, it almost got him killed. Almost got them _both_ killed. Can't. Not again. Not now.

 _Later. Maybe._

He nods down at her knife - mostly clean and once more sheathed at her hip. "Stay at the house. Keep that on you. Anything shows up that ain't me, you put it down."

No hesitation this time. She nods.

It's still her.

 _Please be here. When I come back. Please be with me._

He turns and heads to the bike, kicks it into a roar, leaves her.

* * *

Not like last time. He's not exploring. One thing and one thing only, and thank Christ for that, because it's simple, and he has a couple of relatively simple backup plans. He needs to hit one place and one place only, and it's right off the central road they took through.

Town still quiet in the heat of late afternoon. Except faintly - and he's not sure how he missed this before - he can hear groans and hisses and the rattle of chainlink. Very possibly they had gone docile before he waltzed through that door and woke them up. Very possibly they'll go docile again if he gives them long enough. At least - as far as he can tell - they're still confined.

He doesn't go down that street. He moves on past it, past the pharmacy, toward the hardware store a few more blocks down. The big front window is smashed, glass everywhere, but inside the mess is minimal, not too many things missing, not too much scattered in the aisles and no sign of walkers, and along the wall at the back he finds exactly what he's looking for.

Loops of razor wire. Fifty feet. He grabs two. Back toward the front, two pairs of sufficiently thick gloves, extending most of the way up the forearm.

Back to the bike. And back up.

It's all a blur. He was aware of looking, finding, picking up. Now speed and the roar of the bike beneath him. He's the machine now, and his sole function is to keep them as safe as he can, even if that safe is a bad joke and means nothing in the end. Doesn't matter. He needs to do things. He can do this.

He can ask her to help him, and she will.

And that might be how he brings her back.

* * *

She's still there.

He pulls the bike to a halt in the drive, cuts the engine, but he doesn't climb off. Doesn't move. The world has settled into a hot, sleepy late afternoon, all cicada buzz and only the faintest breeze, the birds too sluggish to sing.

Somehow it's the buzz of the cicadas that makes it as bad as it is. Like a cloud of distant flies. A plague. They fill his head as he stares at her, hands numb, lips numb, and the sound flows from his brain all the way down to his feet and numbs everything else. He's the remnants of a thing that used to move. He's been amputated from himself. He's a ghost limb.

She's there, kneeling in front of the deer carcass, bent over, arms smeared red up past the elbows and glistening in the sun. The front of her shirt is soaked in it, chunks of flesh here and there. It's dripped into her lap, spattered her jeans. It's everywhere. It's all over her.

He told her she should bathe. She has.

She lifts her head, pushes herself up. The ends of her hair have stuck together, congealed into brown spikes. Red all over her throat, her cheeks, her nose. Her lips.

She's chewing.

She swallows. Flashes him a quick smile with teeth like rubies. "Hi, Daryl." She gestures at the carcass, at the torn throat, the flank, hide slashed and peeled back and corded muscle and pale fat carved away. Bitten. Gnawed. "C'mon. There's plenty for you."

* * *

Later, he'll have no idea how he did it.

He'll have no idea how he did anything. Remembering it will be like watching himself from the outside, like watching someone else. Watching a movie. Getting off the bike. Going to her. Bending. Taking her hands in his, taking that blood onto his skin. Gentle. Keeping his voice low. Telling her she'd had enough, he had to get the thing under cover or it might be taken by something else. Someone else. Her nodding as if this made total sense, letting him tug her to her feet, direct her inside. Telling her to go into the bathroom and wait for him.

Her, docile again. Doing as he said. Not questioning him, not resisting. Not fighting. Blood all over the doorknob. Her back, her swinging crimson hands and forearms. Like she herself was skinned. Like she took that knife and took it all off, left it in a pile by the deer.

The fucking deer.

He drags it away. He drags it to the lower ground just beside and under the deck, where the drop is just as sheer, and he shoves it over and watches it fall. It hits one of the rocky juts, bounces. The crunch of bone is audible as its rib cage caves in. A hundred feet further down it hits the boulders that line the bottom of the cliff and bursts. Breaks open like a balloon of blood and gut, splatters over that pale, pristine rock.

That's what it would be like. That's what would happen. If it was him.

If it was her.

He doesn't vomit. He doesn't because he makes himself not do it, because he won't, because he signed on for this and he shouldn't be surprised. Shouldn't be shaken. Should just accept. She did this, it was always coming, and just thank a God who can't possibly be anywhere near this that it wasn't him lying there instead of the deer, throat ripped open and her feeding on him.

Except she would never do that, would she? Attack him, try to hurt him, try to _kill_ him, sure. She might. But she wouldn't try to feed on him.

He's dead too.

They're both dead, together.

* * *

He goes in to her, and she's waiting in the bathroom just like he asked her to - he didn't specify but she went into the big bathroom off the master bedroom, which they've both been using. She's sitting there on the clean white tile, and it's not clean anymore; it's smeared far more than it should be just with the movements of her body, far more than that could account for, and the smears are loops and swirls that look _intentional_ , and that's when he realizes she's been fingerpainting.

He crouches. He does this because he does it, because he will.

"Still need you to help me. Can you?"

She nods. Lifts a bloody hand and looks at it, turns it this way and that, moves her fingers through the air in graceful, waving patterns. She seems fascinated by herself. Entranced. Enthralled.

She was never a child to him. He looks at her now - under the blood, under what she's done to herself and the outward evidence of what she believes she is - and that's what he sees.

He uses one of the fluffy white towels taken from a cabinet at the far end of the room and water from the sink. He half-heartedly wipes off her face, her hands. Does what he can with her arms. There's nothing to be done about her shirt, her jeans. He won't even try.

It doesn't matter.

"Alright," he murmurs, drops the towel onto the horribly decorated floor and steps back. She's still a mess. He can't fix that. He can't fix anything. "C'mon. We gotta make it quick."

He leads her back out to the bike, hands her a roll of wire and a pair of gloves, takes one of each thing for himself, and walks her down the drive toward where the road narrows.

He doesn't look back at the long, curved streak in front of the house. If he could feel relief, he would be relieved that she doesn't either.

* * *

He honestly could have done it alone, but with her, like the deer, it goes faster. Together they put on the gloves and unspool the wire, and he marks trees on either side of the road around which they can wrap it. There's more than enough. Like before, she takes direction very well, and it begins to come to him that she might be so easy to handle now because she got what she wanted. What she thinks she needs. She hadn't been allowed to have it at all, not really since she woke up. The deer wasn't alive, wasn't thrashing and screaming, but it was fresh, warm inside, and it was close enough for her.

She got her meat. She got to feed. So now she's happy, content, and she'll probably do whatever he says.

He's still too numb to feel sick.

They end with two taut lines of razor wire stretching across the road, one at the level of his shins and one at the level of his chest. It's not impossible for a walker to go around, but one of the anchor trees is almost flush with an outcrop and the drop on the other side becomes very steep very fast, and he thinks it's unlikely. It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than nothing, and the only real problem with it is that if he wants to go back down, doing so is now a bit more of a hassle.

If he wants to walk, he can just walk around. The bike is something else.

It is what it is.

When he beckons to her, she follows him back up to the house. She doesn't speak. He doesn't either.

He has nothing to say.

* * *

The sun is beginning to set when he builds up the fire.

He said they could do it this way and she agreed, so they will. Before, it was something he wanted her to do in the interest of connecting her to some scrap of what it once meant to be human. Now it's because she's still streaked and smeared with blood, drying brown on her hands and arms, her neck and face, caked under and around her fingernails. In her hair. She reeks with it. She gets close to him and his stomach turns.

Blood never used to bother him like this. It was just another feature of the days.

And he's never, in all the time he's known her, been disgusted by her.

He finds a bucket in a utility closet near the kitchen, fills it with water, sets it near the fire. She's sitting on the couch again, boots off and legs tucked under her, _The Secret Garden_ open in her lap. She hasn't once looked at him since they came in together and he went to get wood. As far as he can tell she's ignoring him completely.

He's fine with that.

It's when he's left and returned with some towels and soap and is setting them down on the floor by the bucket that she speaks again. Not, as far as he can tell, to him. Not to anyone in particular. It's quiet, low, unprompted by anything he can see. But he freezes, bent, and listens because he can't not.

 _One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts - just mere thoughts - are as powerful as electric batteries - as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live... surprising things can happen to anyone who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot be in one place_

 _Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow._

She's quiet again. He straightens up, and when he turns her head is still bent over the book, her eyes half closed, the fire catching them beneath her lids and making them glow. Like an animal's.

His hands are still bloody from when he took hers. When he tried to clean her. What made him try to do that? What was he actually hoping to get from it? What the fuck could _she_ have gotten? What good did it do her? What good is _any_ of this really doing her?

He thought he was getting her back.

"Take your bath," he says, and leaves her.

* * *

He spends some time in the very back bedroom, looking over the books on the shelf without registering any of the titles on the spines. None of it is interesting. None of it means anything. These are the stories of a dead world, and in the end they didn't mean anything either. They're like dead languages, where the tablets and the carvings and the scrolls remain but no one's left to speak the words. The alphabet and vocabulary and grammar can be deciphered and made sense of, and the words can be read, but no one remembers what any of it sounded like. They have no weight, no reality. No one uses those words to govern or teach or converse or buy or sell, to fix things and break them and go to war and beat peace into being. No one uses those words to sing to a baby. No one uses those words to say _I love you._

They might as well burn.

But she won't let go of that fucking book.

He's not thinking, standing there, wandering aimlessly from room to room, tracking the passage of the last of the light but forgetting the time. He's not thinking when he walks back down the hall and the short flight of stairs, when he turns and there she is.

Then he _can't_ think.

He never looked at her. He could have - could have glanced, peeked, and she wouldn't have known. She doesn't know now, not as far as he can tell. She's on her knees on one of the towels he set down for her, facing the fire with her back mostly to him, face unseen, naked and washing herself. She's doing it slowly, almost meditatively: rinsing the cloth in the bucket and wringing it out, passing it over her skin, returning it to the bucket and repeating the exercise. Her hair is damp, falling all around her face; she must have washed it too.

He never looked at her. Never looked like this, never saw how the curve of her waist deepens when she's kneeling this way, how the fire casts her head and shoulders and upper arms in a kind of low sun-glow. He never caught a glimpse of her bare thighs folded against her calves and slightly spread, never saw the graceful dip of her spine, never saw her raise an arm to pass the cloth over her back and reveal her right breast - small and full, the soft hint of a curve rather than the curve itself, nipple tight and tiny with cold. She was marble; now she looks gilded. All her skin shadows and ruddy gold, shining wet in the firelight.

He never looked at her like this, so until now he never looked away, fists clenched stone with a tornado spinning in his chest. He never looked away, hands bloody and everything burning, acid eating into his throat.

She was never a child to him.

He looks at her now and that's not all he sees.

* * *

She dresses and in spite of her earlier meal she eats what he puts in front of her - fire-heated tomato soup and more crackers - as she always does, feeds herself like a machine with those even, regular rises and falls of her elbow, her arm, the slide of her spoon against the bowl coming every few seconds like a surrealist clock. He doesn't look at her as she eats, and he doesn't eat with her. He moves around in front of the fire - building it up against a night growing surprisingly cool given the heat of the day, gathering up the towels, picking up the bucket.

The towels are - like everything she touches, it seems - streaked pale red. The water in the bucket is pink.

She doesn't once glance up at him.

He empties the bucket outside. Stands for a moment and feels the slipping temperature, tilts his head back and stares up at the sky. It's clear. Expansive. It curves over him, cupping the world in a dark palm. The stars are almost too brilliant to look at.

The long smear of blood in the driveway looks black.

He brought her up here to save her. To try. But he knows that was wrong. He knows he was an idiot. Now he's trapped here with something he doesn't recognize, doesn't understand, isn't sure he wants to. He has no idea what happened. No idea what's going on.

No idea how this is going to end.

* * *

A while after, he sits in the last of the firelight and watches her sleep. Didn't put her to bed. Didn't cover her. Didn't stroke her hair - still a little damp. He's keeping a distance. He's not sure when he'll be able to stop.

It feels like today lasted a week. Maybe it did. His sense of time is definitely fraying at the edges. Getting slippery. Soaked in blood.

When he closes his eyes everything he sees is bloody. He looked at her, feeding on that deer, and now he thinks about how he first met Rick and how this whole fucking thing began, and years later, deer again, falling to his knees in the woods when everyone was dying in every meaningful way. Dead girl, walker girl. Even at her most - apparently - sane, that's still what she's making herself into. That's still what a significant part of her _wants_ to be.

And she's there a few yards away from him, curled on her side with her arms tucked against her chest, looking so small, the scars on her face like deep rivers cut across a landscape seen from miles up, the imprint of his hand darkening around her wrist like a perverse replacement for the bracelets she lost. Motionless and breathing, face relaxed. Blood pulsing through her, warm. Soft. Last night he held her and tonight he thinks if he touched her again he would burst into flames and he would deserve it.

He fucked everything up. He's still fucking everything up, because he won't get away from her. Because he won't take her home. Because he refuses to let her _have_ a home. Because he is, to a degree he only now sees and can only now admit, making this place a prison and making himself her jailer. Her warden.

Except he's also making himself something more than that, and something worse. Something worse, seeing her like a child and then seeing her _that way,_ and it's wrong. It's very wrong. Since she dried herself and dressed he's been hit by wave after wave of subtle, almost imperceptible dizziness. Vertigo. The floor is unsteady. The wind pushes against the house and it feels like it's rocking very slightly, moving like a ship sailing through dark water. No map. No stars to steer by. No land in sight.

He'll sleep. They'll wake up and she'll throw her pretty things off the mountain and he'll feed her and they'll do whatever they do, and he'll tell himself they're safe, and he'll tell himself he's safe with her.

And he'll tell himself she's safe with him.

* * *

When he does sleep, when he does dream, it's of her teeth. Stretched out on the pavement, her hands on him, tipping his head back. When she clamps her jaws down on his throat and rips her head sideways, he thrusts his fingers into her hair and moans her name.

It doesn't hurt.

It's better now.

* * *

The dream is gone and she's staring at him from across the room. There's no light anymore but her eyes are glittering.

She smiles and her teeth are rubies. His mouth is full of blood.


	7. in a fire now we will go

**Chapter 7: in a fire now we will go**

He stands and watches her, but once again he doesn't go out to her.

It's a cool morning. A little gray - overhead, not on the horizon; a high shelf of cloud the trajectory of which is difficult to determine. It doesn't seem like it matters much, and as he stands at the door to the deck, still shirtless, still blinking owlishly in the beginnings of the light, he feels the numbness from the night before lingering.

He doesn't want it, that essential lack of feeling. Even though he senses he might need it. What's coming next... It might be fine. Everything has been swinging wildly back and forth between mostly fine and completely terrible, and there's no hard evidence to make him assume today will be one or the other. Probably it'll be both. But there's no reason to assume immediate terribleness. And after she did this she seemed happier. Both times.

He watches her all lit up, that same quality of pristine coldness - something impossibly distant, impossibly separate. Unreachable. You don't try to save a statue.

You don't try to save a dead girl.

Unless you're as insane as she is.

He turns and begins to make his plodding way toward the bathroom, planning ahead to breakfast - canned pineapple and oranges - and scanning his own interior for anything to grip and hold onto. Yesterday doesn't seem real, and he doesn't think it's just the numbness. None of what happened - what he can remember, and a lot of it is weirdly hazy, dreamlike - makes any sense to him now. The deer. The walker. The deer again. Her, soaked in blood, eating. Feeding. Washing her after.

Her washing herself. Her breast, her hard little nipple peaked in the firelight.

That last shivers through him and he shoves it violently away. That was... Everything was strange. It was a moment. It's over. There's no point.

Looking at himself in the mirror, in the colorless light pushing its way through the frosted glass window. From downstairs he can hear the slide of the door, though her bare feet are silent against the hardwood, at least from where he is. He listens anyway; one of the steps creaks and he'll hear it if she's coming up to him.

And if she does?

He braces his hands on the edge of the sink and stares into his own eyes, half obscured by his hair. They look sunken. His cheeks are hollow. He's pale and the lines are standing out on his face just as dark and sharp as her scars. He looks old.

He feels old.

If she came up here? If she tried something? Last night she was docile. She was easy. Again, he thinks about that, about how she very possibly would have done just about anything he told her to do. That by giving way a little, letting her have what she wanted - or at least not resisting her or trying to stop her when she took it anyway - he got what _he_ wanted. Or at least as close to it as he's likely to get right now.

 _You gave her a treat and she was good for you._

He glances down; he's gripping the porcelain so hard the blood has been forced almost entirely out of his hands. They look like dead hands. Fresh walker hands that haven't yet started to rot.

He doesn't want this.

He closes his eyes, sets his jaw until it aches. He's going to be good to her today. He's going to try. He's going to trust her as much as possible. He's not going to treat her like a fucking child. She's not a child. She's still Beth. In terms of her behavior she might indeed be presenting herself as something between a sweet, sad little girl and a spiteful little girl and a monster, but she's _still Beth._ She's broken but she's _still Beth,_ and she's not _gone._

If she came up here to him? He would turn to her and touch her shoulder, lead her back downstairs and do what he's going to do anyway. He'd put food in front of her and make sure she eats it. Make sure she washes up, gets dressed, and yes, these are things he would do for a child, but he won't fucking think of her that way.

She's Beth. Nothing he could do for her can change that. Nothing he could do _with_ her. He's not that powerful.

Nothing he could do _to_ her.

He pulls a shirt on, throws some water at his face, goes back down.

* * *

She's walking along the bookshelves, running a hand over the things on them. Books. The sculptures, the vases and figurines. There are now a bunch of very noticeable gaps where more of them used to be. At some point - probably not very long from now - she's going to run out. What then? Where will she go for her pretty little things to destroy?

This is assuming they'll be here long enough for that to be a problem. Which he is - he realizes it as he does it. He's assuming exactly that. He genuinely believed this might take only a few days. He was that fucking naive. Thought he _was_ that powerful. He could bring her up here and she would be with him alone, like it was, and she would remember.

He could bring her up here _and have her all to yourself._

 _Couldn't you?_

He clears his throat and she turns around. Her eyes are dreamy, not entirely alert, but it's better than it has been. She's focused on him. She _sees_ him. And she smiles, just a small flash of her teeth.

Crooked in the front. Somehow that tiny detail always caught his attention, always drew him. He sees it now and it's like the whine of a mosquito in his ear.

 _Teeth on his throat. Jerking, tearing. Ripping. Blood flooding his mouth, his sinuses. Arching and making it run up his face to burn hot in his eyes. World full of blood. It was a home she made for the both of them._

She runs an absent hand through her tousled hair, as if she's trying to push and pull it back into some kind of order - and maybe she is. Could very well be. He can let himself believe that. It's not a huge risk if he's wrong. She always took care of her hair even on the bad days, if she could. Combed it out with her fingers. Worked out the most egregious tangles. Pulled it back, braided it, and it hits him all over again that it's pretty much too short to braid the way she did and will be for a while. If she work a brain into it, it would be nothing like it was.

"Hi." She cocks her head slightly, frowning. It tugs at the long scar on her brow. "Are you alright?"

"I'm." He clears his throat again and twitches his gaze away from her. To the shelf behind her - to a gray ceramic thing that looks vaguely like a giraffe. To the standing lamp a little way to her right. To the sofa, that ugly coffee table, to anything but her. "Yeah. 'm fine."

"Okay."

Suddenly she's moving toward him, smooth quiet strides over the area rug, her expression clearing. Once again she has that look of dim, flat contentment. Gotten what she wants. Gotten her way. So how long does this last?

What might he be willing to do in order to keep it going?

She stops in front of him - not close. Hands at her sides, head tilted up to meet his gaze, and she's glowing. She's actually just about literally _glowing,_ as if she soaked up the young sunlight when she was out in it going through her little ritual. As if last night, kneeling in front of the fire, she soaked that in too. Before all this, alone with her, it seemed to him that she always had light around her, that somehow she attracted it even on darker days, but every time he wrote it off as his imagination. He wasn't doing well then. It wasn't by any means impossible that he might see hints of things that weren't there. Even after... He had reasons for seeing that then too.

But he'd swear it's real. Swear it's there. Cheeks flushed, the skin of her neck and bare arms creamy. Her hair.

He swallows. It's like a stone going down his throat.

"What's for breakfast?"

"I'll get it."

She tilts her head again. _Little bird._ "I can help."

"Nothin' to help with. 's just cans."

"I want to do more." She was glowing; now her face is darkening. Not much, but he doesn't mistake it. Storm clouds, not yet here but threatening on the horizon. "Why aren't you letting me do anythin'? I'm not a _kid_."

He could brush her off. Or try. But she's _Beth,_ even if she sounds like a sullen child, and he lurches to his very core as he goes ahead and says it.

"You're sick."

She blinks at him, the clouds broken up and blown momentarily away by the force of her confusion. "I feel fine."

"You keep thinkin' you're dead. You ain't fine."

Just like that, the clouds roll back in - _crash_ in, bringing thunder, and her face twists, reddens, lips pulling back from her teeth. Little bird; little _beast_. Not a walker; walkers moan and groan and hiss but they don't snarl, and their eyes don't blaze. Which isn't hyperbole. That eerie glow is surging brighter. Not sunlight but the volcano of madness rumbling inside her.

He stands there and plants his feet. He can't be ready for this but he's going to try. After yesterday... He can. He can take something awful, something that should be unbearable, and he can bear it. He can. If she's a storm, he can bend and not break under her.

Everything in him is going cold again.

He's expecting an outburst. He's expecting her to hiss at him, let that spiteful girl out to play with him, maybe just attack him, come at him with her claws and her teeth, but she does none of those things, and he was right. He can't be ready. Because all she does is step closer and reach up, lay her fingers against his lips. Like when he gave her back her knife and she touched his face, they're cool. Smooth. They burrow under his skin and tie up his nerves, and the outline of the bruise he left on her wrist blooms dark in his vision like threatening unconsciousness.

"You had my blood on you," she says softly, and that's when he knows. There's no other way. Nothing else to explain it. Edwards never would have told her something like that, even if he had noticed. No one else would.

She remembers. He was sure she was dead, but she was alive enough to see it. There was enough of her left to _remember_.

"Right here. On your mouth." Gentle. Relentless. The storm is gone again; there's nothing on her face now but beautiful, pitiless calm. "Maybe I was turnin' already. Maybe that's how I saw it. I was confused. Everything was spinnin' around. Nothin' was the right shape."

He can't move. She's pinned him with a touch. Is he bending? He doesn't know anymore. This isn't a gale. This is something so much worse, and he could never have expected _this_ but he should have expected something he would be completely unable to deal with. And he could tell her that she couldn't have been turning anyway, that she was shot in the fucking _head,_ but he already knows that won't help. Won't do a damn thing. She's smart. Very. She can think around any argument he can throw at her, and she can just ignore the rest.

She's always been so sure of herself.

"Everything was screamin'." Even softer. Barely a whisper. She's close enough that he can feel her breath on his neck, warm puffs of air. So alive. Jesus fucking Christ, she's the most _alive_ thing he's ever seen. "I always wondered what turnin' was like. Maybe I bit you." Her fingers are moving, sliding from his mouth down to his chin, through the scruff there, along his jaw and dipping into the hollow of his throat. "Right here. Maybe that's how it happened."

He can see flecks of green in her eyes. She turns her head and the sun catches her, turns her hair to cornsilk strands and lights up every color in her irises. Gold, now. Violet. Her eyes look like opals.

She fixes her gaze on her hand, on where it is, almost frowning, deeply thoughtful. And this isn't Beth.

He doesn't know who this is.

She hooks her fingers, digs her nails into the skin over his carotid artery. He sucks in a breath and doesn't move, and the truth lurking inside it crashes in on him like a wave.

He doesn't want to.

"Maybe I killed them all," she whispers. "I couldn't go to Heaven after that. I couldn't be with Daddy and Mama and Shawn. Maybe I killed them and I didn't let them turn. But you turned. You would. You'd turn and you'd be with me. You'd want to. Wouldn't you?"

 _Beth._ He's just mouthing the word. There's no voice behind it, no air. Every time he breathes, those hard little edges dig in deeper.

"We're together again. Just us. You said we'd stick around. You didn't _want_ to find the others. You didn't want that at all."

Nothing else. She's silent, staring at him, breath caressing his skin. He could tear himself back. He could shove her away. Of course he doesn't, of course he won't; his eyes half close and almost imperceptibly his head tilts back and he gives her more of himself. Offers. It's that thrumming, buzzing numbness - a feeling like the blow of a hammer through a pillow: that right now, like this, he might not have anything left to lose.

Which is insane. He has everything left to lose. He has so much more to lose than he did two weeks ago.

Yet here he is.

At last she nods, confirming something to herself, and before he can even hope to process what she's doing she lifts up on her toes and presses a kiss to his cheek. Slow.

It lingers.

"I get it now," she breathes. Lays a hand on his chest and uses it to push herself away. Steps past him and heads for the kitchen without looking back, leaving him standing, gazing blankly at nothing. At the space where she was, like he can't comprehend how she came to be there and now he can't hope to comprehend her absence. Behind him he hears the clink of her getting bowls, silverware.

Yes.

She's not the only one who got what she wanted.

* * *

He lets her get the bowls. Really it's not even a matter of anything he does or doesn't allow; by the time he manages to turn and go to her, she's set them out on the counter. But she's there in front of them, unmoving, and when he stops at her side and looks at her, her frown is heavy with consternation. It might just be that she's not sure where the cans are. But they're behind her and to the right. She must have seen them before now.

She's standing here like this, motionless and confused, because she genuinely doesn't know what comes next.

It pierces him when it arrives: He told himself he wasn't going to think of her like a child. But what he was planning to do, to feed her... That's exactly what it would have been. Now he has a chance to reexamine it. Perhaps do something different.

He touches her shoulder again, lays a hand over it. Light. Careful. When he speaks he keeps his voice low and smooth. Soothing.

"I was gonna crack open the pineapples and oranges." He pauses, gives her shoulder a little squeeze. He can feel the bones too sharply under his palm, ridges pressing into him. "Can you get 'em for me?"

She still isn't moving. But he can feel her muscles shifting, can feel that _she_ feels him, is reacting, and as with everything else, it's something. What she just said, what she just did to him - it doesn't matter, and that's another thing he's coming to realize: he really _will_ take anything. He'll take it and he'll put it away, because there's nothing else now but her. She's going to keep trying to hurt him, and she's going to keep hurting him without trying, and he can give up or he can stand and take it.

"Pineapples?" She echoes him so softly, barely more than a whisper. She sounds bewildered. Nothing like the gently relentless keenness of before.

"Cans." His other hand finds her shoulder, rests there. It rises and falls as she breathes. "You wanted to do somethin'. That's somethin' you can do for me."

Nothing. Then, slowly, she pulls away from him and steps around, past. He turns to follow her progress and he's half certain that she's just going to wander away, but she goes straight for the stockpile on the counter and picks up the cans, the right ones, and brings them to him. Holds them out, meeting his eyes without wavering.

He takes them from her. It's a tiny thing, what she's done. What she just did for him. On the face of it, it's not even all that different from other things she's done since they got here. She might not be able to function _well,_ but she's made it clear that for the slim majority of the time, she can function.

But he asked her to do something for him and she did it. He didn't trick her into it. He didn't manipulate her. He didn't make her think it was something it wasn't. He asked her and she did. She tried. She's _been_ trying. Under the cloud of the other things that have happened, that she's _done,_ he almost lost sight of that.

"Thanks," he says quietly.

Yesterday was awful. But that was yesterday. Today might be better. It really might.

Maybe he can do something.

* * *

She's almost done with her steady, mechanical eating when she stops, spoon full of syrupy orange and halfway to her mouth, and looks at him.

"What happened to the deer?"

He looks back at her, and while his stomach doesn't quite sink, it becomes noticeably heavier. Everything does, and it's pure resignation. She remembers; of course she would want to know. She might be content to eat what he's giving her, at least for now, but she wanted fresh meat, fresh blood, and having it made her happy.

A treacherous part of him, sluggish and dragging itself through the dark, regrets what he did with it. Even if today it wouldn't be nearly as fresh and might not do much to satisfy her.

"It got taken." And if she's asking, she didn't see it on the rocks below when she was performing her morning sacrifices. Or she saw it but she didn't understand what she was seeing. "Guess I didn't hide it well enough."

"Oh." She looks disappointed, but indistinctly so. He can't see any sign of anger, any sign of frustration that might turn verbally or physically violent. She frowns at her bowl, her spoon and her hand, then brightens as something seems to occur to her. "That's all right. We can go hunt. We can get more."

And that's when he knows he's trapped. He set something loose that he's not going to be able to contain. He set something up and he's not going to be able to get out of it. She has a taste for it now. And she's not going to just forget, and sooner or later she's going to stop putting up with excuses.

She's gone back to eating, spooning the last of it into her mouth; watching her, he thinks of footage he once saw on some TV show or other of a Japanese robot building a car. Her lips are shining and sticky with syrup, and a drop of it has escaped and trickled down to her chin. It looks like a tiny, dully glistening gemstone.

Her chin dripping with blood. Her ruby smile.

If he doesn't give her what she wants, she'll find a way.

* * *

But he's not going to leave it at the meat and the blood. At that way of reaching her. She's Beth; she's given him glimpses of what he's trying to find when he really got down to it and _treated_ her like Beth, and he has to keep doing that. That's the one way that shows any promise at all.

He can do something. It might be stupid, might be crazy - especially after yesterday - but so is literally everything else he's done, and so is being up here at all. There's really nothing he _could_ do that isn't. So as he sits on his bed and pulls on his boots, his attention strays to her and locks there, unable to get free. Locked on her shoulders, her back, her hands pressed against the glass at the front of the room, and the opalescent eyes he can't see but which he knows are staring out at purple-blue-green peaks and valleys, all drenched in late morning sun - the sun that outlines her body, folds her against itself.

This is going to be a pain in the ass. But he actually feels pretty good about it. She has her knife and she's demonstrated that she remembers how it works. And if he returns to her gnawing on another animal, there are plenty of worse things he could find.

He stands and shoulders the crossbow.

"I'm goin' on a run."

She glances over her shoulder but doesn't face him. When she speaks her voice is level, but not flat. "Alone?"

"Yeah." His fingers wriggle briefly in the empty air, as if they need to grab something and hold on. But to the extent that he can, he's going to be honest with her. "Like yesterday. I'll get in and out quicker if it's just me. And it'd be good if someone was here to watch the place."

Which isn't a lie. It would be good. Provided she can protect herself. Provided she understands that she needs to.

She shrugs, still not turning. "Suit yourself."

"Alright." He looks toward the door, almost starts toward it - then stops. Treating her like Beth... Not like she's fragile. Not like he has to watch every fucking thing he says. She was always straight with him, blunt like a punch even when she was soft about it. Harder with the truth than he ever was. She never treated him like a child. She had expectations of him.

He's not going to insult her now.

"You gonna do anythin' to yourself?"

"What?" But she knows what. He can hear it. She knows and she's asking because she wants him to specify, and he can't tell _why_ she wants that, and while it doesn't actually go so far as to worry him, he's not fond of it.

He can almost trust her. But he's not going to be able to fully trust her until she's well.

"You gonna hurt yourself?" He pauses and then pushes on, jaw tense and hoping she won't notice. "Yesterday you told me you were gonna if I didn't take you along. I need to know you're not gonna do that."

She does turn, finally, and crosses her arms under her breasts. She's changed and she's wearing a different pair of jeans - he only managed to bring her two and he's not sure she can wear the bloody one now - and a top which, he notes with a jolt, is almost the same shade of yellow as-

He can't read her face. Some of it is the light, some the distance, some just that he can't. But she shakes her head, and he doesn't sense any dishonesty in it.

Before this, she never lied to him. Not once.

"Alright." Still he hesitates, studying her, and now she's studying him right back. Not defiant, and not aggressive in any way he can see. She's just... searching him. He has no idea what she's looking for.

"I'm gonna get you some stuff," he says. No manipulation whatsoever. This is his sole reason for going, and it's yet another reason why he wants her to stay. And it's a reason he likes. "I want it to be a surprise."

"Oh."

And she smiles.

It's tiny. At first he thinks it might be his imagination. Is sure it is, sure it's wishful thinking, sure that he is, as she said, merely seeing what he wants to see, and he does want to see this so bad. So fucking _bad._ Before, all that time before, he came to understand - in the midst of doing it - that he was trying to make her smile. Even in the shack, before the moonshine, talking to her about his father, his fucking _father,_ and somehow erasing the horrible things and just making it funny in kind of a pathetic way. Making it a joke. Seeing her smile. All that crying she had been doing, all that sadness, how he hated seeing it and he couldn't do anything, and then she smiled and it was because of him, and it reached into him through his eyes and sparked down the tangled cord of his spine and wound itself around his heart.

He made her smile. He couldn't imagine ever getting tired of doing that. Then she was gone and he knew he was never going to get to see that smile again.

But here she is. And he shouldn't be sure because he can't be sure, it's so dangerous to be sure now, but he is: He's sure that he'll leave and he'll come back and she'll be all right. And she'll be waiting for him.

"I'll come back soon," he says, and he goes for the door, walks out, and inside he's feeling the closest thing to peace that he thinks he's felt in...

He doesn't know anymore.

As he goes to the bike, he doesn't even notice the long, dried smear of blood. He just steps over it. That was yesterday. This is today.

She's all that matters.

* * *

Getting down there is more of a hassle now, but it can be done. He left a pair of the gloves on the seat of the bike and he takes them with him, stops at the roadblock they made and unwinds the two wires. He half expected to find a walker pinned against them, maybe more than one, but there's nothing in sight. Nothing he can hear. Quiet late morning, the distant piercing cry of a hawk, the breeze in the treetops. He stands for a moment, one of the wires wrapped around his gloved fist, head back and eyes closed and letting the sun bathe his face

Hope is such a treacherous road now. But he wants to walk it. He wouldn't have come up here with her if he wasn't committed to doing so, if he wasn't willing to risk what he has to risk and do what he has to do.

And she would want that. He's sure. She would want him to take that road, follow it to the end. She would want him to try.

Possibly this wasn't a tremendous fucking mistake after all.

* * *

When he pulls up the big road through town and cuts the engine, everything is still quiet except for the distant rattle-moan of the walkers pushing at the chain-link, and even that seems more subdued than it did. They sound like they're getting discouraged, losing their focus with nothing to zero in on in sensory range, and maybe they're slipping back toward their mysterious kind of biological sleep-mode. The sound of the bike engine probably woke them up again, but it's possible that it will less and less each time.

Maybe there won't be many more times anyway.

Maybe this can be the last time.

 _You fucking idiot._

But he's not hearing that as he climbs off and heads toward the store he parked in front of. It's small, ragged blue awning hanging over the door and emblazoned with a heavily stylized drawing of a mountain peak and a few pine trees. The big picture window announces GIFTS and SOUVENIRS and behind it are displayed exactly that - t-shirts, books, pins, big cheap figurines of bears and wolves, soaring eagles. Useless shit, especially now, but he's not here for them. He knows stores like this - has been through more than a few since the world went to shit, because they often contain shelves of dried fruit and nuts and various kinds of chocolate - and he knows they also often contain something else.

None of the glass is broken, but the door is locked. He wraps his fist in his bandanna, smashes out the glass by the handle, pulls it open.

Inside it's dim and silent, racks of clothes and case after case of trinketry forming a weird, half-seen funhouse maze, but as his boots crunch over the scatter of glass, his bow is already up. He got stupid before. It's not happening again. He's not dying on a run like this, _for_ this. In addition to everything else, it would be fucking humiliating. Because part of him regards the fact that he's even _here_ as humiliating, as ridiculous, risking his life for bullshit she won't care about, that will probably mean nothing to her. That has nothing whatsoever to do with keeping either of them alive.

Except it does. It really does. It does, in every way she would understand, because she always loved the beautiful things that had no reason to be there other than their own beauty, and those things were taken from her, and it's not right. It's not how it was supposed to be.

And she smiled at him.

Right on cue: groan-shuffle from the back behind a long counter that runs almost the length of the wall. He stands and waits, unperturbed, as a tall, skinny figure dressed in a rotting blue sales clerk uniform emerges from the shadows and stumbles toward him, eyes like dusky marbles in the thin light. It's a few yards away, already reaching for him, when it catches a foot on a fallen rack of sweatshirts and pitches forward with a grunt that sounds almost exasperated.

 _Oh, come ON._

At the same moment his bolt hits it between the eyes and snaps its head satisfyingly back, orange and gold fletching standing out oddly bright as a shaft of sun catches it. The walker crumples and lies still.

Daryl bends a knee and jerks the bolt loose, straightens and listens. Nothing else. If there _was_ anything else, _it_ or _they_ would almost certainly have come as soon as they heard the first one.

Still. He cocks the bow, reloads, lifts it and moves on.

The place seems bigger than it should be, more mazelike the longer he's in it, but tucked in a half-hidden alcove near the counter he finds it. Not large, not a huge selection, but it's better than nothing, good enough that he won't have to search anywhere else, and when he turns the spinning rack the dangling gold and silver and beads glitter in the same shaft of sun that caught the bolt. Earrings, necklaces, pendants and bracelets.

He studies them. Looks up and down. He'll know it when he finds it. He'll know _them._

In the days after they ran, he started noticing things about her. Wasn't fully aware that he did, or that he was carefully tucking each observation away into the mental filing cabinet where he tends to keep them and always has. He noticed the journal, noticed the braid in her hair and how she maintained it, noticed all the tiny things she did to keep herself human. He noticed her jewelry, how she always wore it - which could be explained easily enough as her simply forgetting that she had it on at all, but he knew her well enough by then to know that wasn't it.

Her earrings, those delicate little flowers. The gold heart around her neck, lying against her breastbone. Her bracelets.

They were _her._ As much as feature of her as anything else about her. Not just something she wore, because everything she kept and wore and did was a kind of resistance, a strike against the dark - the deepest and most fundamental manifestation of _who she was._

Who she is. Still. Under everything.

Has to be.

He turns the rack like a turbine, as if it could power something - a full steady rotation and then another, allowing his eyes to unfocus slightly. The glitter and flash catches him, pulls him in; he recognizes the slowing hyper-attention of hypnotism. This is also stupid, he really shouldn't be letting that happen, but he does, and the fifth time around he stops the turn hard enough that the dangling chains and earrings swing.

He picks one of the earring pairs off the rack and holds it up.

Small five-petaled flowers, what looks like aquamarine. Not the same as what she had, but close, and the blue of the stones will set off her hair, be set off by it. Make her brighter.

He pockets it, turns the rack again.

It doesn't take nearly as long to find the other things he wants. Bracelets and wrist cuffs hanging on a thin plastic tube; he slides five of them off and hooks his fingers through them, examines them. Brown leather thongs beaded with blue and green and gold glass. Plain spherical beads but also cubes, stars and more flowers, even more complex shapes. Again, it's not much like anything she wore before - a little fancier, for one thing - but it's close enough. And lifting them into the light, staring through them with his gaze dancing from bubble to bubble and imperfection to imperfection, they feel so much like her.

She'll like them. He knows she will.

Into his pocket to join the earrings, another turn - to the necklaces and pendants - and there's the last thing.

Very simple. Very plain. A silver chain from which dangles a bird in flight, wings fully spread and head raised as if it was cast in mid-song.

He slips it free and cradles it in his palm, staring down at it. Imagining. Undoing the clasp, nudging her hair aside. Laying it against her throat. Sliding the clasp back into place. A fingertip against the warm, soft skin at her nape, downy blond hair above the top of her spine.

He closes his fist and squeezes his eyes shut.

 _Stop._

But there's a point - in reference to whatever, to something he doesn't want to see, doesn't want to _know_ \- at which he won't be able to. And he has no idea where it is.

He leaves, and he's almost hurrying.

He could be done. For a moment he thinks he is, until he remembers something else. Her hair, what she used to do with it, and it's shorter but it's long enough to get tangled now and it's lengthening all the time. He makes his way down the street toward the pharmacy he hit the first time here, and inside he stops at the half-aisle devoted to cosmetics and accessories. He scans past eyeshadow and foundation and lipstick, nail polish and manicure sets, until he reaches the brushes and the hair-ties, and he picks up one of the former and a multicolored pack of the latter - elastic, simple as anything else he's found for her, but wound through with faintly glittering metallic thread. Maybe she can't make much use of them now, or wouldn't want to, but soon...

And he stands there with these things in his hands, the almost unnoticeable weight of the jewelry in his pockets, and maybe it's not true and he's overreacting because it's been a fucked up few days and he's very aware that it's fucked _him_ up pretty badly even if he's managing, but he thinks about these things he's found for her, and the candy, and the girl into which she keeps transforming, a younger girl, much younger, immature enough to be a specific kind of petulant and resentful and generally difficult, and he thinks about feeding her and putting her to bed and he thinks about her breast in the firelight and her nipple, and how he knows that if he cupped her it would be a hard little nub fitted against the creases of his big palm, and he almost hurls the brush through the window.

 _STOP._

She's not a fucking child.

He shoves these last two things in his pockets and stalks out of the store, climbs on the bike, chews up the road.

Behind him and falling away, the rattles and moans of the penned-in walkers echo off the walls of his ear canals.

* * *

She's waiting for him.

She's sitting on her bed, bent over the journal she's resting on one crossed leg, and he can tell even at a distance that she's not writing the way she was. It's not that desperate and constant scrawling, the same motions over and over again - once more that terrible resemblance to a machine. The movements of her hand vary as she carries the pen down the page, and now and then she pauses.

He clears his throat and she looks up - a startled jerk of her head - and pulls the journal in close to her chest as if she still expects him to snatch it away from her and hurl it into some abruptly existent fire.

Christ, _why_. Sudden hot frustration grips him: Why does she have to _do_ that. It wasn't him that burned it anyway.

He grits his teeth, shoves it back. Not now. Not when he has these things for her and he's going to put them in her hands.

"You're alright," he says quietly, lifting the crossbow's strap off his shoulder and leaning it against the low side of the sofa, and it's both a statement and a question.

Nothing. Just her wide eyes and wide gaze frozen on his face. Then - slowly - she nods, and equally slowly he goes to her and crouches.

He's not sure what he's expecting. But she closes the journal and sets it aside, pushes up to her knees and shifts closer to him. "You said you were gonna bring me somethin'."

"Yeah." Moment of truth. Maybe he should be more nervous than he is; his fingers are barely shaking as he reaches into the pocket containing the jewelry and lifts it out, opens his hand to her and lets those pretty little things shine in the sun. Same sun that makes her shine in the same damn way.

She looks down at them, expression unreadable, eyes unreadable. She doesn't move, not an inch; he can hardly even detect any breathing. All at once he's not sure he's breathing either. On some saner level he knew when he decided to make this run that she might very well stare blankly at these things, even reject them, but she's not. She's just _looking_ at them, the distant outline of a thoughtful frown behind her brow, and as he watches her with his lungs rolled up like window shades she lifts a hand and plucks the necklace out of his spread palm, holds it up and follows the smooth spin of the bird with her unreadable eyes.

The corner of her mouth tugs ever so slightly upward. A twitch that halts and keeps its place.

He can breathe again.

He reaches down with his free hand and gently takes hers, curls his fingers around it - still soft, still cool. That bruise... That, too, was yesterday. He won't be like that now.

"C'mon."

He helps her to her feet and leads her to the downstairs bathroom.

* * *

He's never seen her look at herself, not since he lost her for the second time. It's a very strange thing.

Standing in front of the mirror, him standing behind her, he watches her tilt her head this way and that, following her own movements with a vaguely nonplussed look on her face, and he thinks of footage of animals he's seen who catch sight of themselves in a mirror and become convinced that they're looking at a potential enemy. Or merely another animal, as confused as they are, the bafflement continuing until they notice that there's no sound or scent and they lose interest and wander away.

It's bad to think of her like that. He doesn't want to. But he does anyway.

He fitted the earrings into her lobes when it became obvious she wasn't sure what she was supposed to do with them, and she kept still and turned when he turned her. Except for the once, she hasn't spoken since he came back, but she hasn't made any move toward making a problem out of things, and he'll take it and be satisfied. He wasn't sure about the bracelets, but when he finally decided to suck it up and lift her forearm - fiercely ignoring the bruise - and slide her hand through one of those leather loops, she suddenly seemed to get the idea and did the rest herself. When she was done, she kept her arm raised, gazing at the beads, apparently lost in contemplation.

So he let her do that for a while. Then he turned her toward the mirror and gathered her hair and pushed it to one side, took the necklace in his hand, unclasped it.

He can do this. It's not going to be like that. Like in his traitorous mind.

"You remember what you had before?" He's not moving fast, settling the bird beneath the hollow between her collarbones and lowering it to rest against her sternum. He's also not expecting any response from her. He's just talking, because he's not sure he's entirely comfortable with the silence in here. "I know this isn't totally like it. Think I did okay, though. Looks good on you." _Looks right._ "Couldn't find any hearts. But I thought you'd kinda like the bird. Maybe."

She's quiet. Gives no sign now that she even heard him. She could be lost in herself again, lost in her own reflection, understanding nothing. When she goes in there he still doesn't know how to bring her back.

All he can do is what he can do.

He closes the clasp and releases the chain.

And for an awful moment he's sure he _is_ going to do it. Won't be able to stop himself. His fingertip will linger, his _fingertips,_ her skin and how smooth it is and how it feels so good to touch it and feel the life flooding deep under it like an underground river.

He doesn't. He pulls his hand away and her hair covers her nape again.

He thought this might be the point at which it would come back to her. This might be when he would really _see_ something in her, recognition or even memory, and she might touch these things and know them and comprehend what he was trying to do for her. He was trying to reach her, and she might be reached. It's so stupid to hope, but he hoped. He found some faith and he held on and refused to let go.

But she tilts her head again and blinks, and he knows he's not going to get anything from her. And he finds that he's barely disappointed. He's just very tired.

Without his intending them to, his hands found her shoulders, and now they leave and drop loosely to his sides. He tried. It's a dull thought and it does nothing to block the oncoming grayness he can sense around the edges of everything, but he supposes it still does count for something.

And these pretty little things are pretty on her. It's good to see.

"Alright," he murmurs, and he starts to turn away, heading for the door because this isn't a large room and suddenly it feels far too small, but she whirls and catches him, curls her arms around his middle and holds on, her head pressed against his chest. She's on him before he knows it, and before he can stop himself - or work up any inclination to do so - he's reciprocating, his own arms wrapped around her and hugging her tight.

She did this before and all he could do was touch her fucking elbow, because she blindsided him. He wasn't ready for that. There was no way he could ever be ready for her, warm and solid against him, small and strong, whatever she used to wash her hair that day so fresh and clean and filling him up when he inhaled.

Not the same scent, when he lowers his head and rests his cheek against the crown of hers. Not the same soap. But still fresh. Still clean. And she's still small and strong and she so, _so_ alive.

Time warps, twists in on itself. He doesn't want to move, and it might be that sheer desire to stay in the moment that keeps the moment going. It's so easy to hold her like this, easy like it might eventually have been if she hadn't been taken. What they might have had.

Might have done.

But he can't.

 _Stop._

He extricates himself, hands once more on her shoulders as he steps back. Her face is still difficult to read as she stares up at him, but she's alert, and her gaze is narrowed in on him. Narrowed sharp. She does see.

He got what he wanted.

But he's not sure she did.

* * *

Dinner is quiet, and not by candlelight, because the sun is still in the process of setting. He left her alone for most of the rest of the day, not done much of anything; he sharpened his knife and put it away, waxed the crossbow's string, wandered the house again - as if he wasn't well acquainted with every foot of it by now. He picked that afternoon to go through one of the bedroom closets, the unlabeled boxes - which proved to contain nothing more useful or interesting than a bunch of photo albums and some old clothes. Ties. Shirts. A hat - vaguely like Dale's. He put it away again in the bottom of the box, piled everything else on top of it.

He didn't look at the photo albums. He doesn't want to know. This place already feels full of cold, impersonal ghosts - ghosts of the house itself and all its things rather than the person or people who used to live here. He doesn't want to give those ghosts faces and names. It's really better if they aren't human in origin.

She read, as far as he knows. Made her strange rounds of the bookshelves, touching, running her fingers over their contents. He wonders if she's selecting the things she'll destroy in the morning.

Then dinner. Canned beans, canned sausage. Tomorrow he really needs to go out and see what he can find in the way of fresh things - greens if nothing else. There might be gardens in town. He hadn't wanted to go back there so soon but he should look. Should have looked today, but he didn't want to stay any longer than he had to.

He'll be all right.

She finishes, sets down her spoon, looks up at him. He freezes and looks back, and he knows before she even opens her mouth that she's going to ask him something and he's not going to like it. No idea how he knows. Maybe just because he's actually getting to know this bizarre, capricious, remotely demonic creature she's become.

"Are you goin' out tomorrow?"

He grunts. "Might."

"Alright. Well." She pauses, chewing at her lower lip. There's a spot of grease at the corner of her mouth and he wants so badly to wipe it away. "If you do, and you won't take me, can you get me some meat?"

She doesn't mean to cook. She doesn't mean spitted and roasted. He knows that too. She had some. She's assuming she can have more. That he'll allow it. Facilitate it. Didn't he get her to help him bring back the carcass? For her to eat? How _else_ was she supposed to interpret that?

He's so fucking stupid.

And he got what he wanted. And _she'll be so much easier to handle if she does too._

He meets her gaze without flinching, without giving in to the violent, nauseating clench in his gut. It's not just her eyes. It's the blue glitter of her earrings, the glassy sheen of the beads circling her wrist. It's the singing bird in flight.

This is Beth. There's nothing he wouldn't do for her.

"Yeah. I will."

* * *

Later, by the fire, he brings her another bowl and sets it down on the floor where she's sitting and writing, and he sits down beside her. Nudges it closer to her with a soft scrape against the flagstone hearth. She folds the book against her chest, still looks apprehensive, but then she glances at the contents of the bowl and her apprehension melts.

She reaches out a hand, presses her fingers into it and rakes them through. The dull rattle is like her beads. He watches her - eyes, mouth, every muscle shift and every hinted emotion - and tries to breathe.

At last she raises her head. She's not smiling, not exactly - or he can't see it if she is. But her face is doing _something_. It's not blank. Not at all.

"I like the blue ones best," she murmurs.

He nods. "I know."

They're all blue. Every one. He sorted them out, set them aside.

"I told you."

"Yeah. You did."

She scoops a few into her cupped palm and lifts them, peering at them as if she's come upon them at random. Completely unexpected.

"By... the fire." She turns her head and her earrings sparkle like tiny stars, gone silver in the firelight. "After? After we burned it?"

 _Oh my God._ He exhales heavily, too heavy to be a sigh. _Fuck_ not hoping. How is he supposed to do anything _but_ hope? She never allowed him to do anything else. She blocked off every other avenue and foreclosed on every other option. He _had_ to hope. There was no other way to be with her and by the end being with her was all he wanted.

"After we burned it," he whispers.

"You gotta stay who you are." She lowers her face, her eyes, and tucks the journal into her lap. She picks up one of the M&Ms, lifts it to her lips, slips it between them and closes her eyes.

If the entire room was on fire he wouldn't be able to look away from her.

"Not who you were." Not even a whisper. Carried out of him on a breath thin as paper. She nods slowly and doesn't open her eyes, plucks up another M&M and holds it between her forefinger and thumb, extends it toward him.

This is Communion, he thinks with all the sudden, wild force of a summer storm, wind howling through his skull. This is a fucking Eucharist. She's trying to save his soul. They're in Hell together but she's still trying, because she can't stop. Because even broken and scared and lost, even shattered into too many pieces for him to ever reassemble, she can't stop trying.

This is Holy Communion, which he has never in his life taken, because it would be an empty act in praise of a God who was never there.

But he does believe in her.

He could take it in his hand. He doesn't. A dream has descended on him, drifting to him through the light, settling over both of them like a canopy. Anything might be possible, so everything is. So he keeps his hands planted on the floor and leans in, closes his lips around her sanctified fingers and sighs as the sweetness melts onto his tongue.

* * *

He doesn't touch her again. Doesn't watch her go to bed. He sits in front of the fire as she leaves and he doesn't look over his shoulder. He listens to the sounds of her moving around, going upstairs, coming back down, the rustle of her sheets as she slides between them. He stares into the flames until they've burned themselves into his vision, dancing and leaping in purples and greens and blues.

He might be trying to make himself blind.

 _Stop._

* * *

But it doesn't take.

His eyes fly open in the dark, in the moonlight, and he thinks it might be like before - he might have to tear himself up and out, destroy the space between them and hold onto her. Keep her from spinning into the night, over the cliff edge to explode on the rocks below. He's on his side, sheets tangled around him, but he's ready. Staring at her, muscles tense to spring, watching her twist and writhe.

Except she's not screaming. It's not screaming that woke him.

He can see her across the room, distant, her pale outlines rising and falling in graceful sine waves as she lifts her hips to meet the hard, rhythmic thrusts of her hand. She stripped and kicked the sheets down into a mound around her ankles, stretched out with a firm grip on her breast and twisting at her nipple, her legs spread wide and her other hand working between them, palm smacking against her mound and almost drowning out the wet squelch of her cunt as she fucks herself.

No idea how he's hearing that over her gasps and ragged moans but he is. No idea how he can see the sheen of her juices smeared across her inner thighs but he does.

Because she's not across the room at all. She's close. Lying beside her like this, he can see everything, and now it's not moonlight soaking her but the last of the light from the coals, somewhere between crimson and oil-black. He can see the sweat beading her skin, the cords standing out in her neck as she throws her head back, the silver bird gone gold and fallen against her throat. Red stars in her ears as she rolls her head from side to side, mouth wide as the noises forcing their way out of her deepen and roughen. He can look down and watch her pinch her nipple, tug cruelly at it, torment it into a hard little peak and go to work on her other one. Her waist lengthens and folds as she crunches herself up, falls again, lifting herself with her feet planted flat against the mattress. The rattle of cut glass at her wrist.

He can see her juices beading in her pubic hair and clumping the curls together. Her slick fingers as they pump in and out of her cunt, quick glimpse of her clit swollen past its hood as her palm lifts and grinds down again. Her lips sticky and squeezed beneath her hand, beaded strands stretched between the two.

She's so wet. She's so fucking _wet._

He shouldn't be able to see any of this but he does. He sees everything. And the light is spilling over her and staining her red, all that sweet wetness between her legs the color of blood, it _is_ blood, her shining lips streaked with it, a line of spit on her cheek not spit at all and congealing, and when she shakes and wrenches herself up as she fucks in deep as she can, her bared teeth are those cut rubies. She's bathed in it, fed and contented herself, and now she's doing _this,_ because apparently being dead is no obstacle to making herself come.

 _Oh God._ Frantic, every muscle tense and tight and looking ready to bust through her skin, both hands on her cunt now, fucking and circling her pounding clit. _Oh my God, oh_ God _, oh, oh, ohh-_

He's so close, he can smell her, smell her sweat and her sex, smell what it would be like to bury his face between her legs and eat her alive - _feed_ on her, be the one drawing these sobs out of her, dig his teeth into her and rip at her with one hand on his cock. He does, he is, jerking himself rough and fast with his pulse thudding in his throat and his head, but all he sees and feels and _wants_ is her.

Flesh and blood.

 _Meat._

Reaching for her with his free hand as she arches higher and higher and finally extends so far and so sharp he thinks she might be about to snap her spine, and he hooks his fingers under the chain around her neck and folds the bird into his hand, squeezes it so hard he feels its beak piercing him, and the narrow jab of pain is what kicks him over the cliff with her, spurting hot and thick all over his fist and her hip and belly and biting back his cry as she lets hers go.

 _oh Jesus Christ DARYL_

Shaking still, all control he ever had burned away, and somehow through the flood of his orgasm he can focus on the blood spattered over her and coating her thighs and her spasming hands, across her skin and his fingers and his shaft, running down his knuckles. Dripping from the slashes across her face.

Trickling down her brow from the hole in her head.

* * *

Sun stabs into his eyes.

He twitches, groans, rolls away and folds an arm over his face, burrowing into the pillow. His head hurts. Everything hurts. His arm was better but now whatever he did to it is grinding beneath his skin, joints like scraping boulders every time he moves it.

Sitting up seems like a questionable decision. But he does it anyway, because that seems to be how he operates these days.

He didn't even _drink._ Not that he recalls.

He stays put for a few minutes, hunched over with the sheets slipped down low on his waist and his hands pressed against his eyes, until he feels capable of getting up and looking at anything for more than a few painful seconds. He rolls to his knees and shoves himself to his feet, hissing with pain as his arm flexes again, and pushes his hair back from his face as he squints toward the mattress by the window.

No one. Of course. The sun is high enough to shine; she'll be out on the deck doing what she does.

He stumbles across the room toward the window and the sliding door, contemplating painkillers, contemplating the possibility that he hurt himself worse than he thought - or somehow hurt himself all over again. Slept the wrong way, twisted it under him. Didn't feel it until now. It could be possible.

Anything could be.

He sees her, her small form swallowed up by her t-shirt, bent over the railing with her hair a bright halo combed by the wind. Like before, like all the times before, and he stops, gazes out at her, lays a hand against the glass and pulls air into his lungs like taking a long swig of whiskey. Hoping it might dull something. Not that it ever would.

He's alive and she's alive, and that means it's going to hurt. It never meant anything else.

Something glitters in her hand, winking as the sun plays over it. He follows it, bemused; it's not anything he recognizes from the shelf. Not any other part of the house as far as he can recall. She extends her hand and it dangles, wrapped around her fingers, silver in the morning.

Silver.

He slams both hands against the glass, everything in him surging into a scream and ready to tear out of him, crack his chest with the force of itself, but he can't do anything. He can't _ever_ do anything. The bruise on her wrist is stark, hideous, purple-black - exposed. Naked. He doesn't have to see her earlobes to know that no flowers are blooming there.

He watches as she lets that silver bird fly.

Lets it fall.

Pain stabs into his left hand and he whines, jerks his away like the glass has burned him - for a split second he's sure it has. But it's not burning. He sees what's there in the center of his palm and his veins fucking crystallize.

A prick, tiny and red. Not bleeding, but it was. Something that could have been made by a pin. Could have.

Wasn't.


	8. the world is heading ever southward

**Chapter 8 - the world is heading ever southward**

He can't take his eyes off her.

He couldn't take his eyes off her when he first found her, either. Because he couldn't believe it. Because a horrible, traitorous part of himself didn't want to. He stared at her and stared at her and hoped that she wouldn't notice, or if she did that she wouldn't care, and as far as he could tell she didn't do either. Didn't care that he was there at all, a lot of the time. So he could look. Look all he wanted.

Seems like that now, too. She comes back in with her ears and wrist and neck bare. All gone over the cliff. All made sacrifices. Leaning back against the counter, he watches her mechanically consume the canned sweet potatoes he's set out for her, and he studies her. Her face, her hands. The whole attitude of her body. She appears more than unconcerned; she appears to have slipped back into that distant flatness. But at least she's calm. There's no indication of instability in her at the moment, not that it means much.

No instability. Like nothing happened.

Because nothing did.

No blood streaked on her. None on him. He went to the bathroom, stripped, checked every inch of himself - it's stupid, crazy, it was just a bad dream, just one of the worst fucking nightmares he's ever had, but he checked anyway, and then he checked again. Examined under his fingernails. The inner creases of his thighs. Even between his goddamn toes. Everywhere.

Nothing.

Nothing happened. He's fucked up. There's no way he _couldn't_ be fucked up. He's struggling, even if he's not struggling like her, and he has been for months. Now he's alone with her and he knows perfectly well that insanity can be contagious, and with nothing else up here, no one else to talk to and no one to help him, he can't possibly be surprised when his fucked up brain decides to fuck with him.

Doesn't mean he wants to... He doesn't want to _do that_ to her. Doesn't.

Doesn't want to see her like that.

But today he's going to hunt for her, because he _said_ he would, because he got them into this and he's not sure it'll actually hurt her any worse than she's already been hurt - the dangers of eating raw meat aside - and because he's frankly not sure what else to do.

If he gives her some of what she wants, he might get some of what he wants.

 _Not that._

But he can't help himself, what he does next. He has to.

He doesn't have much control over everything here. He doesn't entirely have control over himself, if it comes to that.

"Why'd you throw all that stuff away?"

Slowly, she lifts her head. She's still blank, but there's something flickering behind it. Something bright and conscious. "What stuff?"

"Stuff I got for you." He narrows his eyes, slightly but he knows she'll see it. And once again - and he hates it with astonishing viciousness - he doesn't feel like they're in this together. He feels like they're circling each other, looking for an opening, and he'll have to break her. "The necklace, the other stuff. You threw it over. Why?"

Her frown is very faint - puzzled. Puzzling. Then her face smoothed out and she shrugs. "It was pretty."

And that seems to be all he gets.

* * *

While she's dressing, he sits on his bed and stares down at his hand. The little red mark is still there in the center of his palm, stark as stigmata, but it looks smaller and fainter than it was. It might be his imagination - must be - but he'd swear it's fading as he watches.

An hour later he can barely see it anymore. Two hours and it's like it was never there at all.

* * *

His arm feels a bit better, and better still after he dry-swallows some more painkillers. She stripped off the dressing on her hand the day before and the bitten parts of her fingers look better too. He sits in the chair across from the couch and studies her some more, smoking, peering through the coiling wisps of it at her bent head and her curled body as her pen moves rapidly across the page of the journal.

She heals fast. Always has. He remembers her slashed wrist; took only a couple of days to shrink and start fading into pink skin. Before she began covering it with her beaded leather thongs and her cuffs.

He noticed even if he didn't mean to notice, even if he didn't realize it then. Noticed it. Noticed her.

He's been noticing her for a long fucking time.

Now he can't take his eyes off her, and he doesn't know quite why - there are a lot of reasons, he knows that much - and it's freaking him out.

He's aimlessly grateful that the dream is fading like the wound in his palm. There's a lot of it he doesn't remember. Just that it happened and it was bad.

"Whatcha writin'?"

She looks up, a little sharply - good, she cares enough to react that much. "You can't ask that about someone's journal."

"I'm askin' anyway." He manages a smile, crooked and anemic. Or so it feels. "You gonna stop me?"

Her gaze is level. Cold. Clouds have blown in and the light has gone pale gray, and it's sucked the life-hue out of her skin. Yet another thing that's freaking him out just a touch, and he's trying to beat it back any way he can.

"Just not gonna answer you. Not if you're gonna be a jerk."

"Please tell me." Folding. Not that he doesn't want to fold. It's easier to fold right now, and he's not sure what he has to gain by trying to play it tough, trying to pretend she can't plunge her hand into his chest cavity and claw him to bloody chunks. She already knows she can. She's known that from the beginning. "Or don't. Whatever you want, Beth. You don't gotta tell me shit."

She's quiet for a while - feels like a long while. He's certain she won't, is ready to deal with it. He'll have tried and failed and that's not exactly a new experience for him.

But at last she looks back down and shifts on the cushion, squirms a little. "Stuff about dreams."

If her gaze was cold, maybe it infected him. He doesn't jump, doesn't gasp; he just quietly freezes all over again, biting down on the cigarette, hands clenched into fists and every muscle locked tight. Means nothing. She has dreams; with what happened to her it makes sense they'd be bad ones, at least a lot of them. She's been through shit. Her brain got blown to hell.

Even if she didn't say the dreams were bad ones.

"What kinda dreams?"

She looks up and past him, vaguely in the direction of the fireplace. Vaguely in the direction of her bed, the windows. The cold leeches into his marrow. "Red ones," she whispers. "Red and black."

He shouldn't keep asking. This isn't something he needs to know. They're just dreams, they're hers, ultimately they're her business. But as before, he can't stop it. As if something else is guiding him now, something perversely determined to root out every potentially awful thing it can find.

"What else?"

Still not looking at him. "Mm?"

"What else was in them? The dreams?"

She shakes her head. Once, twice. "Hands." She takes a breath, one that swells her up and collapses her like a balloon. "I don't remember."

He doesn't want to leave it alone now. Surely he can't. Surely he _won't._ But he does.

Completely without meaning to, without thinking about it, he taps the cigarette out on his tongue. The ash is gritty and bitter and the filtered smoke pluming into his sinuses reeks of stale tobacco that was never very good to begin with. But it doesn't hurt. Or if it does he doesn't care enough to perceive it.

She's still writing, not looking up anymore. And when he rises and tells her that he's going hunting, she gives him a quick disinterested nod. As if she forgot what it meant. That she'll be getting what she wants. As if she doesn't care anymore and she won't care about the outcome.

Maybe he doesn't have to go after all.

But ten minutes later he's shivering as he pulls on his boots, picks up the crossbow, heads out the door and into the slate-toned light and down the drive with the wind picking up all around him and shaking the treetops.

Storm.

He doesn't look at that long, rotten brown smear of blood in front of the door, between it and his bike. Doesn't look as he walks over it, doesn't look back. He doesn't need to see it. Does no good to him. Does fuck-all.

Her bloody hands, bloody lips. Bloody chin and throat. Blood in her hair, all over her chest and belly. Soaking her clothes. The blood on her teeth, all inset with garnets and rubies, and that _smile._

He doesn't want to see her like that.

 _Stop._

He can't control it. Never could.

* * *

Not deer. Nothing large. God, he can't, because not only was it way too much and not only would that much fresh death probably attract walkers even if they've taken some minimal precautions, but it was so _big,_ and lying there soaked in its own blood, it would have been easy enough to squint and blur away his vision and see something of a similar size but a different shape.

Something she would probably find even more satisfying.

As he turns off the road and begins to make his way onto the steep, wooded slopes, moving slow to keep his footing, it suddenly occurs to him that maybe it's not a bad idea to continue to keep her away from the rest of them after all. Maybe there _is_ a legitimate reason that doesn't involve his own unbearable, uncontrollable selfishness.

She hasn't tried to feed on him. She believes - with her fractured, inconsistent logic - that he's dead too. He wouldn't make any kind of decent meal.

But he can't be so sure she'd believe that about the rest of them.

What exactly would happen to her in the Zone? What would they do with a girl who kept trying to tear people apart with her nails and her teeth, who isn't large but who can be surprisingly strong and even more surprisingly quick and agile when she wants to be? Put her in restraints and just keep her there? Put her in a fucking cage? Drug her into oblivion?

Cast her out?

Rick wouldn't stand for that. None of them would. But Rick's position is still shaky. Same goes for all of them. At the moment what Rick has managed to accumulate has been collected primarily through the careful use of intimidation, and that only goes so far.

Just another reason why Daryl isn't in any particular hurry to get home. Why he's _never_ in any particular hurry to get home anymore.

 _Home._

Up her with her... He blinks slowly, gaze sliding across the ground ahead and all around, watching for disturbed or crushed leaves and marked soil, dislodged pebbles. Scattered pine needles. The clouds have thickened and lowered and a lot of the forest floor has been swept into shadow, narrow pine trunks stark lines all around, but that never stopped him before and he won't allow it to do so now. Doesn't matter that his thoughts are moving back in some deeply uncomfortable directions - not that _anything_ he thinks now is all that comfortable. This in itself - the track, the hunt - is still comforting. What he's thinking, he can approach with at least a little detachment. It's not clawing at him. There's no panic lurking inside it, no dread.

Might very well be better to keep her up here.

And maybe he still feels better up here than he would there.

 _You know that isn't true._

He doesn't know anything.

His hand twinges, sharp and sudden like a thorn piercing his palm, but when he jerks it up and examines it in the dimness there's nothing there.

He doesn't know anything.

He knows less and less every second.

* * *

In the end all he gets for her is squirrels.

It's mostly what he sees, it's easy - they're scampering all over, chasing each other around and chittering angrily, like something has them riled up, and he doesn't have to work at it for more than an hour or so before he has two. But it's also that they're small. Small, without much flesh on their bones and without much mess to be made. Because on his way back up the slope he sees the gray and black flash of a raccoon crawling through a thin cluster of undergrowth and the thing actually pauses and raises its wide head, fixes Daryl with glittering black eyes sitting deep in the twin hearts of its mask.

He could take it down, take it back to her. Christ, he could. It would probably make her happier than a couple of scrawny squirrels. Once again ignoring the very real damage he could be letting her do to herself by giving her the meat raw, ignoring all the rest of it and just looking at the sheer value - in her eyes - of what he could bring her.

Laying it down in front of her. Stepping back. Watching what happens next.

Rick told him, once. Clearly hadn't wanted to but clearly had _needed_ to. It was long after it happened, and the fact is that he and Rick don't talk much anymore anyway, at least not like they used to. But this time they were, sitting out on the porch together, him with a cigarette and Rick with a can of lukewarm beer picked up on a run, and it had been a bad day. A bad week. Daryl is supposedly good at telling the difference between good people and bad people, but maybe he's not always so good at telling the difference between good people and bad people and _crazy_ people, because someone he and Aaron brought back, who they thought was fine...

Mother and her two girls. Seven and five. Little blond stick figures, all skin and bone, with blue eyes that seemed to occupy fully half their dirty faces. They were starving, they were desperate, they were so happy to be there. And that afternoon the mother decided their first day in their new home was the perfect time and place to slit those two little throats open in the bathtub and follow up with her wrists.

Fuck knows why. Just one of those things.

So there was Rick, that night, sitting down next to him and talking. No intro. No preamble. Just this story about back when they were still living in the prison, when he found a woman in the woods, said she need help for her and her husband, said she would take Rick to him, and the husband was a severed walker head and Rick was supposed to be...

 _Some people are just too far gone. This? This wasn't your fault. It's not on you. You can't read minds, and there are people you're just not gonna be able to help._

But now there's that woman again, and what she did. Because she couldn't live without him. Even that much of him had been enough for her. Or she convinced herself of that. Because the alternative was worse.

She fed him. She fed him when she herself was starving. She would have killed to feed him, was ready to try. She fed that _thing_ and she told herself it was him and he was there and it was enough. She hadn't lost him. He wasn't gone.

Maybe she could even bring him back.

Daryl drops the bow, braces a hand against the thick, rough trunk of an oak and lowers his head between his shoulders until he stops shaking.

It's not the same. He stares down at the rotting leaves, the thin carpet of gold-brown pine needles, a worm wriggling up through displaced earth. Wind circles him, chilly and smelling of rain and faint ozone. It's not the same. It's not at all the same. She's _alive._ She's not a walker. She's not dead. That's the whole _point of being here._

 _Right?_

This is just so she'll be happy. Just so she'll be easier to handle. Maybe easier to reach.

This is just so she'll be good.

 _Not the same._ All the way back up to the road. _Not the same, it's not. It's not._ He still has limits. He has a whole fuck of a lot of things he won't do.

This used to be one of them.

Something else Rick said that night. One of the last things. Getting up to go back in, turning to look - not at Daryl but out at the dim, quiet street. So normal. So fucking normal that to Daryl it never stopped feeling hopelessly insane.

Something Rick said, and it didn't feel like it was directed at him.

 _They don't tell you, do they?_

 _They don't tell you that_ never _is just another word for_ until _._

* * *

She's sleeping when he brings them in.

Curled on her mattress, knees drawn up to her chest, journal held beneath them in a tight hug. Her hair is half swept across her face, mostly obscuring her scarred cheek and her eye, and all he can see clearly is her full mouth - truly relaxed now, for once. No tension winding itself around her from the inside. No terror, or rage, or whatever the fuck the word is for what she feels most of the time these days.

She just looks like a little girl again.

He doesn't like it.

The rain has started, nothing more than a soft pattering on the windows, and not knowing what else to do, he shrugs off the bow and drops the squirrels on the kitchen counter. If he wakes her now they'll still be warm and she'll almost certainly like that better than if she has them later on, but he stands there, braced on the cold granite bar between him and the rest of the room, and looking at her, and he can't. He can't bear it. There might be things about how she looks now that he doesn't like and finds profoundly unsettling, but she's still _Beth_ and her hands and mouth are clean, and he wants it all to stay that way. Just a little longer. He went out, he did this awful thing for her, surely he deserves that much.

She stirs, jerks her head up and down and flicks her hair back, and her brow furrows, twitches, smoothes out again. He watches her a moment longer, the streaks of rainshadow running down her cheek and hands and arms, her closed lids. Even at a distance of yards, somehow he can see her eyes darting rapidly back and forth beneath them.

He pushes away from the counter and goes to the pantry, grabs a bottle of wine at random, opens it with a soft _pop_ and goes to the sofa, drops onto it, starts drinking.

* * *

He has no idea how long she sleeps. Time gets blurry, slides in and out like a slow tide. The light darkens, lightens, darkens again. The rain continues steady as it's been, but in the distance thunder begins to announce itself with gentle growling that he can tell - to the extent that he can tell anything - won't be nearly so gentle when it arrives. After about half of the bottle he can feel the house swaying in the gathering storm, rocking on its foundations. What kind of fucking idiot builds a house on a cliff? Who _does_ that? Someone with a very extravagant death wish. Probably got it in the end, just not the way they planned. Now he and Beth are up here and it's just a matter of time before the whole thing goes over.

He should make a fire. Give her that extra red light, make her look even bloodier. In firelight, love looks black.

Blood. No. Blood does.

 _Her breast, that cold-peaked little nipple, tracing the pinched areola with his fingertip. Careful. Gentle as thunder. Feel her jerk and moan, clutch his hand, arch into it. Telling him not to stop. Her mouth all bloody, surging close and licking it onto his jaw, his lips, dark smears. Sweet copper. Raised on her knees in front of the fire, legs spread and glistening like ink, cunt raining black onto the flagstones. Pooling in their tiny indentations, their tiny imperfections._

Daryl, please, oh god that's so good it's so good please more god touch me touch me like that like that like that _grappling with his other hand and dragging it to her cunt and nudging him between her dripping lips, throwing her head back and laughing and sobbing when he thrusts into her hot, slick mouth._

 _Clenching around him as the teeth inside her emerge, bite down, bite his fucking finger off._

* * *

He heaves up, gasping his throat raw, head jerking wildly around. Not her, no, fucking _hell,_ it's not. Didn't happen. She's not with him. She's there across the room. Her dim outline is rolling up and down, hips lifting and falling and her back straining upward, and he thinks _oh fuck, no, no no no no not this, this is worse, please don't do this to me._

But he doesn't remember why.

Her hand isn't between her legs and she's not naked. She's gripping the sheets, tearing at them, her mouth pulled into a grimace that can't be anything but pain. As he stares, all the moisture hissing out of his mouth and running cracks through it like desert mud, she kicks violently, untangles her feet, tangles them even worse. Her teeth are bared, lips dragged into a snarl, and he's screaming at his body to move, Christ, _move_ and fucking _help her_ but his limbs are stupid useless things and he can't help anyone.

She wrenches her mouth open and screams, screams with no voice behind it, nothing but a breath that seems to rip her lungs apart on its way out.

 _Gorman._

Then he does move. But he never makes it.

He's halfway across the room when she goes abruptly still, and he goes abruptly still with her, skidding to a halt and gaping. She's on her back, splayed, but her face is relaxed, her entire body, just as much as it was before and like nothing even happened.

Then she stirs, flutters her eyelids and yawns, slowly pushes herself up sideways on one hand and turns her head and blinks sleepily at him.

"Daryl?"

"Yeah." Because what the fuck else is he going to say? "Yeah, I'm... I'm here."

"Mm." She stretches and he hears her spine cracking once, twice, and he flings his gaze away when she bends backward and drops her head between her shoulders, neck pulled into a lovely arch.

This is untenable. This can't continue. He doesn't know what happened, doesn't know why, but he can't. This has never happened before, never with anyone - he's never _ever_ thought these things about _anyone,_ and he's trying to take care of her and he looks at her and sees a child and it's so wrong and it's sick and he's _sick_ and all at once he wants to fucking cry.

 _Stop._

When she looks at him again she's smiling, and it's small but warm. She's happy to see him. God fucking help him, she's happy. If she knew the _shit_ that's chewing its way through his head. "You bring me anythin'?"

Like it's nothing. Like she's asking about anything she intends to consume in a conventional manner. Like she's not even asking about food; like she's a little girl whose father has just returned from a business trip and she's asking about presents from somewhere strange and exotic.

 _Jesus Christ, would you fucking STOP._

He swallows, and the force of it just about takes his tongue down with it. He manages to cobble together a nod.

"Yeah."

* * *

He makes her come into the kitchen, because of the tile. Easier to clean. She gives him an odd look but shrugs and comes willingly enough. Why wouldn't she? He brought her _presents_. She would probably do pretty much whatever he asked, provided it wasn't too unreasonable, in order to have them.

So he picks them up by their scruffy tails and when he turns around she's there with her knife in her hand, and what's on her face...

He looks away. He looks away when he gives them to her, and when his fingers brush her bitten ones in the transfer a shudder runs through him, so violent it nearly makes his teeth rattle.

But he looks at her when she drops to her knees on the clean white floor and cuts them open, carves away their hides, pulls out the gut with her bare hands and tosses it away into a sad, slick little pile, and sinks her teeth into muscle and fat and sinew, and tears it to shreds.

He watches her kneeling in a spreading pool of gore, flashes of pink flesh in her pink mouth as she eats and blood waterfalling down her chin, streaming past her wrists.

He knows about animals, he knows about anatomy and he knows how to take creatures apart, and he's intimately familiar with the process. But he's never seen squirrels that seem to contain this much blood. Furry bags of it. She burst them on her rocks.

He closes his eyes and the back of her head explodes, and he doesn't feel anything.

Thank God, thank the God who cannot possibly be there if things like this happen, he doesn't feel anything.

* * *

Note: Regarding the line: "Never is just another word for until" - I wish to _God_ I could take credit for that but I cannot; it's from the absolutely stunning SGA fic _Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose_ by Synecdochic, which is just... I'm not even in that fandom and never have been and a friend of mine who was sent it to me and I read it and JESUS.

Angry that I don't write that well.

Anyway, credit where credit is so massively due.


	9. the fever now consumes us both

**Chapter 9: the fever now consumes us both**

 _What the fuck have you done._

It's a soft voice. Hardly there at all. He brushes it away like a mosquito. It doesn't matter. Somewhere between the day he brought her here and this moment, the world outside this place - that valley and this house on this mountaintop - went away, and all he has is this, and up here none of the old rules apply. Up here, in this secret garden, magic is real and it's not the kind of magic kids hear stories about. It's old magic. Bad magic. Magic with teeth.

She believes they're both dead. Maybe they are. How sure is he that they aren't? How clearly does he really remember that other world out there? How long has he felt like he didn't _belong_ there?

 _What the fuck have you DONE._

Watching her clean herself up in front of the kitchen sink, ruining yet another towel. She was very good, very proper; she disposed of what was left of the carcasses - threw them over the deck railing - and she made the floor spotless, wiped up everything. Now she's carefully cleaning her arms, face, letting water flow a little way under her fingernails. Picking at them.

He hasn't moved. He can't take his eyes off her.

She got what she wanted. Now it's his turn.

"Who's Gorman?"

He's not surprised to hear that his voice is completely flat. He still doesn't feel anything.

She freezes, her hands still beneath the tap. Absolutely stops dead. He wouldn't have believed it was possible for someone to go so completely still. He can see every muscle in her gone rigid, and only - almost imperceptible - her throat working.

And he knows he's made a mistake. And he doesn't care. Because all of this is a mistake.

She shakes herself very slightly and goes back to rinsing, turning her hands over and over under the streaming water. "He was one of the officers."

"Why're you dreamin' about him?"

"Because," she says serenely, "he tried to rape me."

Oh.

This should enrage him. He's certain it should. This should send his blood crackling into ice and seething into boiling lava. The cold red fog that swallowed him when he killed Dawn - that fog should be returning now. He should want to roar back down this mountain and all the way back to Atlanta, never mind the shit that went down there, never mind all the running they had to do; he should want to charge back into that fucking place and murder everyone he sees without a single iota of inclination to discriminate. Equal opportunity slaughter.

He doesn't feel anything.

"He ain't here," he says softly. It seems like the thing to say. "He can't hurt you."

 _You're safe._

"I know," she says, still utterly calm. "I killed him."

She cuts off the water, dries her hands and sets the towel down by the sink, turns to face him and lifts her left wrist to her mouth and, very calmly, bites down and jerks her head sideways.

He stares at her, stares at the blood welling up around her lips and dripping down her arm with distant bewilderment. Why the fuck is she doing _that?_ She just cleaned herself up. She was so careful. Why the fuck is she getting it all over herself again?

Then everything inside him breaks open.

This is why he wasn't feeling anything. This is why his mind wouldn't _let_ him feel anything. Because now he does and all that lava is there, blasting through his veins, scorching his muscles and crisping his nerves, and screams lock themselves behind his teeth as he launches himself forward and slams into her, seizing her upper arm and her wrist and trying to yank them both free.

He's not the biggest man. But he's powerful, very, and he's bigger than _her_ , and he's always known that he could overpower her if he had to, and once they got here - yet another detail he hated about this whole thing even as he realized it was a necessary truth - he appreciated it as something on which he might at some point depend.

But she's powerful too. And right now she's flooded by her body's chemistry and pumped to extremity and she fights him with strength he can barely process, piling itself on top of everything else he's trying desperately to ignore so he doesn't just curl up on the floor and - following what's beginning to seem like a very rational example - claw at his own face.

Her wrist is a torn mess, ripped open but difficult to diagnose beyond that as the well of blood obscures everything. She's still so _calm,_ not trembling, displaying no particular expression at all; as he grapples with her he sees her face in flashes, her wide flat eyes, the nothingness behind them. The robotic commitment to fulfilling some deep-seated instruction.

This isn't like when she was biting at her fingers. Her teeth snap at her right arm, carving into herself just above her wrist, and he sees a thin string of flesh strip free and dangle from the corner of her mouth before it falls to the floor. This isn't like before. It's nothing like that. She's not trying to eat herself.

She's trying to die.

"Beth, fuckin' _stop it!_ "

He remembers trying to get her hands away from her mouth before, how he was half sure he might end up breaking her bones. Now he's all but _certain_ he will, because his grip is so much worse, so much more inclined to slip and wrench, with his fingers slicking in her blood and his nails hooking instinctively when she jerks in his hold, jerks and spasms and hurls herself backward with her bare feet skidding on the floor, blood spattering onto them, her jaws opening and closing and opening and closing, lightning finally slashing open the sky through the windows and the whole world dissolving into a sick, screaming dream of red and black.

And hands.

Some of that screaming might be her, but he doesn't think so. Some of it might be him, but that feels just as unlikely. This is the screaming of every atom cursed to be in this space and to be part of what's happening here, every particle and every element that has no hope of escape. All of it is so close, and he's holding _her_ so close, dragging her in against him even as she kicks and writhes and tries with blank determination to turn those champing jaws on him. She's bleeding and he doesn't know how badly, or how badly she's hurt herself and still might, but he knows that she's bleeding a _lot_ and she's hurt herself far beyond anything a bandaid could cure.

And she's not weakening one bit. She's just fighting him. Without passion, without fire, feet planted on the floor despite his attempts to shove her off-balance, surging against him like a swelling wave and just as unstoppable.

She's not going to stop. His shoulder has woken up from the painkillers and is shrieking at him, and she's going to wear him down and she's not going to stop. He's shaking her, jerking her body back and forth, trying to get her loose from whatever has her, but she's dragging her wrists back to her mouth and biting her flesh apart, her eyes that violently tranquil blue.

He releases her. Shoves her away. That finally does unbalance her and she staggers, a flicker of confusion crossing her face, and he launches himself past her toward the pantry. He has no idea how much time he has, but it's not enough, it won't be enough, and he's hauling the pack out from the crevice in which he hid it, ripping it open and fumbling with bloody nerveless fingers for the bottles and syringes.

He didn't want to have to use it.

He knew he would.

It would be fucking _wonderful,_ he thinks as he stabs the needle through the top of the bottle, if he could find that coldness again. It would be fucking amazing if he could stop feeling, because that was the kind of void that you can feel growing by orders of magnitude, that aims to swallow you whole, but he could move within it. He could get some kind of distance. It might make this easier because it might make his hands stop shaking, and if he sends air to her heart he'll do the job she's trying to do with her teeth.

And for the most horrible moment he's ever experienced, he considers it.

 _It might be kinder than this._

He scrambles backward with the syringe clutched against his palm, somehow locates his feet, makes it to the door and back into the kitchen. She's kneeling just like she knelt over her _dinner,_ only now she's using those merciless teeth to ruin herself, still calm as a Buddha. Zen regarding her own death. He's so fucking angry, so fucking _jealous_ as he grabs her in a bear hug and holds her still with his free hand on her throat, and before she can jerk away from him he plunges the needle into her shoulder and depresses the plunger, forcing honey-colored sleep into her veins.

It happens fast. She struggles as soon as he withdraws the needle but she's already weakening, and in another ten seconds she sags back against him, body softening, her hands going limp at her sides and trickling more blood onto the floor.

And again... He's taking one breath at a time, feeling the house shaking around them, watching that spreading pool beneath and around her. Holding her in the hallway, getting her all over his hands - that had been so hellish and so simple. There hadn't been any more decisions to make. Hadn't been anything else to question. It had all been over.

Was part of him relieved, then? Even a tiny part? A sliver?

He could just hold onto her now, like that. She's not scared. She doesn't feel anything at all. She's not even here anymore, to the extent that she ever was.

He could hold her and just let it happen.

He's moving again, doing so without intending to and only aware of it when he's already up on his knees and reaching for the towel, pressing it against her wrists. Lifting it, staring down and trying to get a glimpse of the damage before the blood covers it again. But it's not coming as fast as he thought. Maybe there isn't even as much as there seems to be. There's no gush, just a slow welling. She didn't manage to bite through her arteries; she would almost certainly be dead now if she had and they would be sitting in a sea of blood instead of a puddle.

She'll probably live.

"Why the _fuck,_ " he whispers as he increases the pressure, cradling her against his chest, holding her so tight it's as if he might keep all the blood in her body by _squeezing_ it in. "Why the fuck did you... _Why._ "

But he knows why. Or he knows enough.

He did it. What he said. It's his fault. All of it.

All of it always was.

* * *

It's dusk outside and deeper dusk in the house when he finally gauges that the bleeding has slowed enough for him to remove the pressure and pick her up, and he carries her - still boneless, head lolling - to her bed and lays her down. It really isn't as bad as it might have been, and as he cleans the bites out and starts to bandage them he's a little relieved to discover that he's...

He's _relieved_. He is. He feels it.

She's lying with her head tipped toward the window, her eyes half open and her face still smeared red. She looks dead. He notes this with no particular disturbance, not anymore. Apparently up here it's just a fact of life and at this point if he lets it stop him he'll never get anything done.

What he has to get done now is to clean her.

There's something fated about this. Possibly he's used up all his horror, because when he looks her over again and considers his options, he doesn't feel any. Only weariness. He's trapped. The way above him has been blocked. There's nothing to do but descend.

He still has control. He wouldn't have made it this far with her if he didn't. His brain is fucking with him but it doesn't have the last word, and he can do this.

He's not too far gone.

He leaves her and goes to get wood, the bucket she bathed with, towels. As he builds the fire he periodically shoots her glances and thinks - because he can't help it - about her in the firelight, her bare skin smeared with blood, her eyes wide and glittering as she grasped his hand and pulled him to her. Into her. His fingers, her tight, slick cunt, the beautiful, inhuman shadows of her face.

He always thought she was the one who could speak prophecy.

He's been wrong about a lot of things.

* * *

He builds the fire up to roaring, to far more than warm, sets the towels and the soap and the cloth down and the water beside it, and lifts her by the shoulders - so careful - and leads her over to it. He doesn't think about what his hands are doing as he strips her, doesn't think about the skin beneath them. In all their time together he barely touched her, and even since they got here he still hasn't touched her any more than he felt he had to.

Except that's not quite true, is it? The border between the familiar country of _must_ and the far stranger land of _want_ has all but dissolved, and he's having increasing difficulty differentiating between the two. Isn't sure there _is_ a difference anymore.

He wants her back. Needs her back. That's all. The list of things he'll do in order to have that is lengthening, and he's cognizant enough to know that he has no idea where it'll stop.

If she'll come back before he goes too far.

All of this is distant musing. He's slipping back into numbness, and that much might be necessary. But her body is coming into view, bit by excruciating bit - excruciating in the recesses of his mind rather than the forefront - her delicate little breasts, the dip of her waist and the swell of her hips, the small patch of tight curls between her strong thighs. Her shoulders, the line of her neck. Her hands, her bandaged wrists, the tight muscle knitted beneath her skin.

He never saw a woman like this before. Never in his life. Never looked at one this way. Never felt these things. They should terrify him, perhaps more than anything else.

But they also feel fated.

They were there before he ever found her again. They've been there for a long time.

This isn't how it was supposed to be, he thinks as he gently tugs her to her knees in front of him, facing him. He didn't know there was a _how_ and a _supposed_ that came along with it, but this isn't right. Maybe he was supposed to feel this, find her and bring her back and, at some point, let it all flow, let it out and examine it, explore it, maybe offer it to her. Maybe just _be_ with her and never let any of it out. Wanting her in silence. Wanting her that way.

Not like this. Not all this red and black.

She's so sweet and so beautiful and she deserves so much better. So much better than a fucked up man who never could have saved her anyway.

He wets the cloth, rubs soap over it, and starts to wash her.

He could go rapidly, try to get it done as fast as possible, touch her no more than he has to. But naturally he doesn't do it that way, because he's an idiot and because he's set a trap for himself that he can't hope to escape. He takes his time, passing the cloth over her skin and rinsing and repeating, streaking her with pale suds, wiping them away. Those shoulders, those arms, collarbones - working his way down. Cleaning off all the blood, but of course it's more than that; he moves down to her breasts and cups them as he washes her there too - she stained herself through her shirt - and against his palm he feels her nipples hardening into the cool air.

Further down, her waist and belly, her hips, and before he has time to pull himself out of this trance state he's fallen into and ask some very serious and necessary questions about what he's doing, his hand is between her legs - the cloth is a barrier between her cunt and his fingers but even so - and _stroking_ her. Rubbing her. Still washing, yes, but touching her in a way he doesn't need to for that. Curved against her, over her mound, fingertip against the cleft of her lips and the little nub nestled there, pressing, and she stiffens slightly, rolls her hips against his hand and moans.

He stares at her, her skin glistening in the light, all gold and red and black. In horror - yes, he has some left to feel - and in fascination. Her eyes are half closed, lips parted and wet, her breath coming in slow, shallow pulls. This is all wrong, this is so fucking _wrong,_ he didn't even know he wanted it until a week ago and he doesn't under any circumstances want it like _this,_ her drugged and insane and him beginning to feel halfway to the latter, and only a few hours after she tried to bite herself to death. He might as well have done what he saw done so many times before the Turn, gotten her so drunk she can't say no and then... But he could do it. Right now.

He could fuck her.

He knows she wouldn't stop him. Almost certainly wouldn't be _able_ to stop him. He could strip himself, shove her onto the floor and knee her legs apart and drive himself into her. Maybe she's gone, maybe he's not getting her back, and maybe he feels all the worst kinds of helplessness, but he could try to fuck the world into her. If he wanted to.

God, he wants to. He wants to so bad.

He wants to fucking throw up. Because he's sick and maybe it didn't start with this. Maybe he always has been.

He jerks his hand away, finishes with her. Barely touches her the rest of the time. When he's done he rubs her roughly down with the towel and brushes her teeth, washes the blood out of her mouth too, dresses her for bed, and he puts her in it and turns firmly away.

He can still see her, curled on her side. Staring at nothing with fire in her eyes.

He shouldn't do it. He doesn't want to examine his reasons why. But he goes back to the pack and half fills another syringe with sedative, returns to her and injects her. He has to sleep sometime. He can't keep watch all night. And he can't bear to tie her down. And he can't trust her.

Maybe not ever again.

She accepts the needle with a sigh, closes her eyes. Like before, he turns quickly away, goes to get wine. It's not raining now, and he sits out on the wet deck with his back leaned against the railing, a puddle soaking through the seat of his pants, drinking very good Pinot Noir - not that he would know - and staring up at the roiling clouds glowing sickly gray-yellow with their bizarre self-illumination. Deep, monstrous creatures in a very unfriendly sea.

He's not getting her back.

He still has the syringe. He looks at it for a few moments, the gleam of the needle, then flips it over his head, over the railing; he doesn't watch its fall but he hears it clatter on the way down.

 _Fuck._

* * *

Shaking.

Shaking _him._

He wrenches himself awake, up; he's still drunk, a bit, and roaring darkness is pressing in on him and he's confused, vaguely nauseated, and once more it feels like the entire house is rocking and wobbling and dangerously close to pitching over and tumbling down the side of the cliff, even though it's silent outside and no wind is howling now.

And a weight on him, pressing him into the bed, a grip on his bare shoulders so tight and so pointed it hurts him - fingers, hooked little fingers, shaking him with strength that would surprise anyone who doesn't...

Who doesn't know her.

She's barely a form at all. She's mostly sunken into the darkness, visible only through a kind of fog that might be in his head or might really be there, and he's not sure it makes any difference. It's her and she's straddling him, breathing hard, trembling. Groping for him. It slams into him, vivid flashes of that nightmare, those night _mares_ , her skin slick with blood and her hand between her legs, pulling him in with her, demanding. Wanting him. Demonic and beckoning, inviting him to be infernal with her. Inviting him to burn.

He can't. Not that, not now. He whimpers, tries to shove himself up, tries to get enough purchase to scramble out from under her and away - and fuck, she shouldn't even be _awake,_ if what Edwards told him about the dosage is right she should be totally out of it until well into tomorrow morning. But she's here, she's wild and scrabbling at him, and she's gasping something, incoherent - sobbing, and when he manages to push himself up and suddenly he's so close to her, he can feel her tears on his face. Under his thumbs when he lifts his hands and frames her cheeks.

"Beth, what-"

"You were gone," she whispers. "I was there and you were gone, and you were- There wasn't anyone. I woke up and there wasn't anyone and then they were- They were- How could you, why did- They had me, they had me and I couldn't get _away,_ I couldn't get out." She shudders violently, like electricity is running all through her, and now, very dimly, he can see her face, her wide and panicked eyes. "I tried, I couldn't get _out,_ I had the gun but I couldn't get out."

Not the car. She didn't have a gun in the car, unless one was already in there. What, then? What the fuck is she remembering? And it doesn't matter, because she's so afraid and suddenly everything horrible seeping and oozing and crawling into his mind melts away and it's just her, and he has to help her. He has to do _something._ He has to _try._

When she cried before, he couldn't stand it. He would have done anything to make it stop and he never knew how.

"I'm here." His fingers combing into her hair, through it, tugging her closer. Wrapping an arm around her. He hates this, he hates it so fucking much; he never wanted to be the one who had to hold her like this. Not really. Never wanted her to need it, to need _him._ She was so strong. This is so unworthy of her. But he's here. And that confers upon him certain responsibilities. "You're here too, Beth. You're right here. You're safe, you're with me, it's-"

"I wanna be here." She's nodding into his hands, shivering, still crying. Heaving with it. His chest is cracking open. He's going to bleed everywhere. "I wanna be with you, I wanna be with you so bad... I wanna... I wanna be..."

He can't breathe. All at once she's thrusting herself forward, in his lap, arms encircling his neck and her tears staining his cheeks and her mouth arching over his, hot and wet and hungry, her tongue pushing at his lips. Trying to push them apart.

Trying to get inside him.

He's a stone. Locked motionless, arms still around her but not pulling her close. Not pushing her away. Not doing anything. He dreamed about lying next to her and listening to the wet squelch of her fingers fucking into her cunt, and he dreamed about taking her, his own finger sliding into her, teasing her nipples, the possibility of doing so many more filthy, terrifying things to her. And this is a kiss, just a kiss, and somehow it's so much more than any of those things; it's unlacing his spine, spilling marrow into his blood, exploding the back of his skull. It's a bullet shot into him in slow motion. And all he wants to do is lunge into its path.

So he does.

She wants him open, she wants to be inside him, and he opens to her with a rough groan, bursting from cold stone to flames in the span of a second. His hands drop to her hips and drag her in as he slides his tongue alongside hers - bites at it, sucks, teeth colliding with a muffled _clack._ Never kissed anyone like this, not even _close_ \- barely kissed anyone at all in his entire fucking life, and this is devouring him and he wants to devour _her,_ rocking up to meet her, so hard and knowing she can feel it. _Wanting_ her to feel it.

What he can do to her. What he _will_ do.

Because she's moaning so thick and heavy, rolling down against him in a slow grind, hands tangled in his hair and yanking his head back as she lifts herself over him. He knows what's going to happen now, can see it, _feel_ it like it's already here: she's going to kick off those shorts, claw down his own, get her shirt off over her head, arch into him until he's cupping her breasts with no cloth between them, tweaking her nipples, ducking his head to lick at them as she takes him in her hand and lowers herself onto him and clenches so hot and wet, all Hell under her skin, all blood and bone, red and black, riding his cock like he's a horse she means to break. She'll rip him open. She'll bleed him dry, drip copper into his mouth. Flesh tearing away between his teeth. They'll scream a duet at the night.

They're both dead, so it doesn't matter anymore.

 _It does matter._

"Beth," he gasps - against her lips, into her mouth. "Beth, stop."

"I wanna be with you," she hisses. She might be arguing but he knows she isn't. Knows she didn't hear him. Or didn't understand. "Daryl, I wanna be with you, let me... Oh God, please let me, be in me, please _fuck_ me, please..."

"You gotta stop." Pushing at her now, taking hold of her upper arms. The words break out between them; he should stop kissing her but his own fucking mouth isn't obeying him. "Beth, you can't, we can't, you need to-"

" _I don't_ _wanna stop._ "

So she did hear this time. She does understand. She only presses in harder, needier, fumbling between them and closing her hand over him, kneading with her palm. "You want this. I can feel it, Daryl, you want it, you wanted it before, the way you were lookin' at me, don't you fuckin' tell me you don't."

 _I do._ But he doesn't. But he _does_. He shudders as hard as she did, trying not to buck up into her hand, because it's so fucking _good,_ and he just wants to feel good after so much bad, but he...

She's insane.

"No. No, Beth, you-" He shoves harder, squirming, trying to twist away. But she's so strong. "Beth, you gotta. You gotta. Beth, _stop. STOP._ "

He doesn't mean to. It just busts out of his throat like a prison break and it's the same voice as before, when she was biting at her fingers. That quiet steel, coming from somewhere inside him that he didn't know was there. At the same moment he shoves her so hard she goes tumbling backward, trying to catch herself, landing sprawled half on the mattress and half on the floor. He hears the thump, her pained whine, and it's not like she actually fell any significant distance but everything in him dives into cold.

He keeps hurting her. Bites over her bruise and now probably more to match.

Nothing for a second, a second that extends out and out into a temporal prison. He's locked into it. They both are. He sits there and stares into the dark, heart ice in the bottom of his throat.

She's crying again. Softly this time. Soft and broken and lost.

"Beth."

" _Why did you leave me?_ " Nothing more than a choked whisper, and for another lengthy second or two he doesn't fully understand her. "I was so scared, why did you do that? You left me _alone._ " Another moan, but no pleasure in it. No need. He sees her moving, sees her fall, sees her curling on the floor and hugging herself. "I don't wanna be alone, _please_... I don't wanna be alone anymore."

"You're not. Swear, you're not. Beth..." Lifting himself onto his hands and knees, crawling toward her. Because he can't stay away. Even now, he can't stay away. He's so bad for her and he can't help her, but he can't stay away. He _needs_ her. Doesn't need to fuck her, never _did_ need that. He just needs _her_. How he has her doesn't and never has mattered.

One thing that truly doesn't.

"I am. You don't want me." Her cheeks glistening. Her eyes, wide and locked on him. They're pools of ink, of oil. Even if there was light, he's certain there wouldn't be any color left. "I wanna be with you and you don't want me."

 _Don't you dare fucking lie to her. Don't you dare._

"I want you," he whispers. He reaches for her, touches her, and she jerks and whimpers, cringes away from him, and his eyes sting like the points of needles. "I do. God, I want you, Beth. I want you so bad." He hauls in a ragged breath. "But I can't."

"Why not?"

"'cause it ain't right." _Because I look at you and I see a child, and as long as that's true I can't touch you that way. Because there is no way in this Hell or any other, no scenario in which you can say yes to me._ "And you don't mean it."

He feels her against his hand, pushing into him. Her wet face, nuzzling at his palm like a dog. "I do."

"No, you don't. You think you do. But you can't." He swallows and it burns all the way down. But it's true. All of it is. He doesn't have to lie. "I don't want you like this."

Nothing, then. Just the awful, quiet sound of her weeping in the dark, and she doesn't sound like herself. She sounds like a little girl. A little girl who had a nightmare and doesn't know if she's awake.

Doesn't believe she is.

"Beth. C'mere."

Suddenly it's not difficult anymore. It's the easiest thing in the world. He's not hard now, not burning for her; it's all gone. All that remains is her and the dark in which she's losing herself, and he's not going to let that happen. Even if he can't help her, even if he can't bring her back.

If she's going to fall, she won't fall alone.

 _Come here. My girl, come here. Come here to me._

She doesn't pull away this time, and he gathers her into his arms, tugs her back onto the mattress and against his chest. He curls himself around her, holds her, buries his face in her hair.

She smells like the soap he used to wash her.

"Ain't leavin' you," he breathes, holds her tighter as a fresh wave of sobbing rolls through her. "Ain't leavin' you again. Never again. Never. Sweetheart, baby girl, I ain't never gonna do that."

Bit by bit the shaking subsides and she goes loose. Limp. He's not sure she's sleeping - then he looks down and knows she isn't. Her eyes are open and glassy, and he watches for a full ten seconds before that faint glisten flickers out - a blink. Possibly whatever gripped her and shot her free of the drug has slipped out of her and she's sunk back into that black water. That's another thing that doesn't matter. What matters is that she's quiet now, soft and warm, and she's alive and he has her.

He has her.

 _I'm so sorry. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to._

Didn't mean to leave.

Didn't mean to do any of this.

 _I'm sorry._


	10. a slap back to the face

**Note:** Okay, I really need to warn for the stuff coming up, especially in this first bit. Things have been rough so far; this is _bad,_ or at least I think so. I don't want to spoil, but this chapter contains a lot of violence, some sexual fucked-upness of a level above what we've seen so far, and contemplations of some utterly terrible things. There is nothing whatsoever hopeful or happy here. It's relentless misery. SO. :D I will say that this isn't the end. We have at least two more chapters to go.

 **Chapter 10: a slap back to the face for a sin he can't erase**

Eyes open in the gray.

Not dawn yet. The liminal color-period between dark and what dawn eventually becomes. He lies there for a while and stares at the ceiling, feeling himself breathe, feeling the thrum of the blood between his ears, the steady thump of his own heart. He feels things; he doesn't hear them. There's nothing to hear. The house is silent - but it's more than just an ambient absence of sound. It's deeper than that.

There's no sound at all. None. And that gray is all-pervading. There's no color. Everything has been bled out of the world except what his skin can tell him.

Warmth next to him. But emptiness. Absence there too.

The place where she was.

He turns onto his side and looks at it for a while, the depression left by her body on the mattress and the pillow - perfect, complete, as if she didn't get up but was lifted bodily into the air.

It's early even for her. Early for her to be throwing her pretty things down, watching them destroyed.

He lays a hand in the center of the outline she left, feels the warmth soaked into the sheets. She was just here. She can't have been gone for more than a couple of minutes. But he didn't feel her get up. He's been a light sleeper longer than he hasn't, but he didn't feel her leaving him.

He sits up, leans over his bent knees, stares at the silent gray room. The wall of a window, the low, flat clouds outside. The edges of trees, distant ridges. Her bed, empty.

A long, black smear across the floor.

He looks at it, head slightly cocked. Looks at it for a while. It doesn't add up. It wasn't there before. It wasn't there last night when she tried to bleed herself out, when he stuck a needle in her, when he stripped her in front of the fire, when he touched her in a way he had no fucking business touching her no matter what he was intending to do, when he put her to bed and thought about what a piece of shit he is and about how deeply and profoundly he's fucked them both, about how hoping for anything at all right now feels like the worst kind of joke. But maybe it was there later, when she came to him, because it was so dark then and he barely even saw her inches away from him. She was only a faint blur when she fell into his lap and kissed him and begged him to fuck her - because she did. She did that. And he almost gave her what she was asking him for.

Maybe something happened before that. Or after.

He thinks about all of this with cool, blessed detachment. They're facts. There's no point in pretending they aren't. There's no fucking point in pretending anything at all anymore.

So that smear is there, beginning at the foot of his mattress and extending into the gray, swinging around the wall toward the stairs up to the second level, and also the foyer and the front door. It's a trail. Isn't it? Yes, it is.

Something was dragged.

 _You're a tracker. You can track._

Yes, he can.

He pushes to his feet, and it's easy. He should be sore from fighting with her, and he should be hungover from the wine, and he isn't either of those things. He feels utterly awake, perception a knife-edge, every shadow and every line starkly clear in spite of the desaturation of the world. _Because_ of it, even. Animal-vision.

Predator.

He steps to the side of the smear and slowly - bizarrely slowly, as if he's walking through water rather than air - he begins to follow it.

It's blood. He knows this, and he knows it without having to bend and touch it, smell, taste. It's blood and it's very fresh, still wet and dully shining, and there's a lot of it. But not coming fast, whatever it was. No puddles or pools, no splatters. Just an easy, gradual bleed, little by little as it was pulled along. Pulled by something - or someone - struggling. The trail is uneven. It wobbles, stutters. There were pauses - weariness or pain or some combination of the two. Either the dragger was weak, or the draggee was heavy.

Or, again, both.

He's at the foot of the stairs. Soft _clocking_ of something hard on wood. He pauses, turns; the dim bulbous shape of the hindquarters of a deer moving down the hall and out of sight. Its gait is uneven; so is its sound. It's limping.

That's strange.

But the smear is much more interesting, and it leads through the cavernous foyer and to the front door. So he has to go, of course. There's really nothing else he can do. What, go back to bed? Seriously? Go fix himself an early breakfast, go sit out on the deck and drink some more, go swallow a whole fucking handful of Xanax while he's taking care of that little job? Go stare at his own fucking face in the bathroom mirror and try to figure out if there's any remaining way in which he can even kind of justify his own existence?

Are any of those better options?

But he stops at the door, frowning at its heavy dark wood. It's partially open. Ajar. _When is a door not a door?_

All the fucking time because nothing is the way it's supposed to be.

Should he have his knife? His bow, the gun? Anything? Should he be at all concerned about this, about what might be on the other side of this door that could be responsible for the trail of blood he's been following? Because he's _not,_ is the thing. He's not concerned in the least. He's merely curious in a dim, flat kind of way.

Behind him, the quietly uneven impact of the hooves of a lame deer swells, passes, fades into the ether.

He steps through the door.

Still gray outside, but brighter, and it's almost possible to make out red in the streaks of blood - a satisfying thing, even the hint of it, after all that grayscale. He feels good about it, purposefully smudging a line of it with his toe and drawing an outward spike - feels good about its clarity, about how easy it is to follow, about how he feels reasonably certain that he's nearing the end-

Then he lifts his head and his gaze together and all the goodness hisses away into nothing and the cold numbness returns, because his mind is trying to protect itself. He knows that. He's extremely cognizant of that fact. Again, no point in pretending.

At the end of the trail, she's there on the ground. Or he's pretty sure it's her. He can't see a whole lot of her, but he can catch glimpses of pale hair gone bone-white in the gray, spilling all around her and clotting in the blood pooling under her. Her arms are spread limp at her sides, her head lolling back, and she's twitching a little - or he thinks she is but it's hard to be positive with the way her body jerks in a rough, stuttering rhythm - in time with the form over her, obscuring her and bathing her in shadow, on top of her and between her spread legs and thrusting roughly into her. Rutting against her. Panting - a grating, inhuman sound, so loud. Billowing into the air like black smoke.

He can't see its face. Dark hair hanging, hiding it. He stands, watching, considering. Wondering. If he should do something. If there's anything he can do. What he _would_ do, if he did.

The thing on her plunges its head down and in, and he shouldn't be able to see gleaming flashes of ruby-garnet teeth but he does, and he sees them sink into her throat and its head rip sideways - the flesh there already torn, already pumping blood in slow wells and in time with everything else. Chunk of skin and meat lengthening into a strip before tearing loose and dangling, swinging.

He finally sees her face as the thing fucking her and feeding on her raises its head and reveals her, her features twisted into a grimace that he can't mistake for anything but deep, pounding pleasure as more blood streams from her nose and mouth, but he only sees that for a second, because the thing turns to look at him, doesn't miss a beat, and of course it's his own face, and of course he's chewing. Of course he's spreading his mouth in a bloody smile.

He got what he wanted.

* * *

Eyes open in the gray.

He lies there and stares up at the ceiling, and takes some inventory.

He's not gasping. His heart isn't pounding and he's not shaking. He feels no trace of panic whatsoever. He feels no sense of overwhelming horror, though he knows he should. Any sane person would. But those rules don't apply up here. He left them down there. Maybe he left them in Atlanta, at the first moment this idea was conceived. Now he's seen what he saw and there's no unseeing it, and there's no escaping what he knows.

Warm, empty depression in bed beside him. She's gone. But it's lighter gray outside and in, the liminal morning period almost passed through and the dawn arrived, and he knows she's alive and she's out there on the deck, and when he sits up and sees no bloody smear on the floor he knows it on an even deeper level.

He knows a lot of things now.

He gets up. It's quiet but not silent, and very faintly he can hear the waking calls of birds and the hiss and whisper of trees. When he walks across the floor a couple of boards creak under his bare feet.

He glances behind him and sees a line of bloody footprints. Then he blinks and they aren't there anymore. There is nothing surprising about that. He knows what he knows. He knows what he has to do.

They get warnings.

He goes to the window, goes to the side that faces the deck, and watches her for a little while - awake. No sign of the sedative he pumped her full of, that should still be laying her out until mid-morning at least. Like always, her hair is flying, her loose shirt is clinging tight to her when the wind pushes and tugs at it. He's not at all astonished to see that she's holding _The Secret Garden_ in her hands, and when she lifts herself up on her toes to watch it fall and sends her journal after it, she's smiling. Tiny, but it's there, and it occurs to him that he would still do _anything_ to keep seeing that smile, commit any number of sins, any number of horrific and unforgivable acts, that he's that far gone and he could slide further still. That looking at her now, he sees the graceful line of her throat and he thinks about closing his teeth on the softness at the juncture of it and her delicate shoulder.

He would be careful with her. He would.

He closes his eyes, hand pressed against the glass.

When he does what he has to do, he has no idea how she's going to respond. It doesn't matter. Yesterday he was still pretending, he was still trying to run away from it even as he did what he did to her, but he can't do that anymore. What's inside him. What he sees when he looks at her, what she sees when she looks at him, what they both want. What they might do. She's no longer so mysterious to him. He's gone down to meet her.

So close to her now. Just like he wanted.

He turns away from her and goes to start the day.

* * *

He waits until after she's eaten, after she's settled into herself a bit. Waits a couple of hours. Without comment and without either hiding it or making a big deal out of it, he's starting to accumulate things. Pull things together. Preparing. They might have to move fast, or _he_ might have to; he has no way of being certain.

They get warnings. They don't get many. He knows things now, and one of the things he knows is that they're out of them. They're out of time. He gets her out of here, _now,_ or something is going to happen and he won't be able to stop it. He won't be able to stop her. He won't be able to stop himself. She'll find a way.

So will he.

She's sitting on her bed and staring out the window. Outside, the clouds are thickening and lowering, and even looking at them is like smelling rain. It's going to storm and it's going to storm _hard,_ and they're going to be traveling straight into it. Like the whole world is set on keeping them here, or at least making escape difficult.

That idea isn't nearly so ridiculous as once it would have been.

He walks over to her, stands behind her.

"We're leavin'."

She doesn't turn. But she stiffens. He sees it. A twitch and tense of her shoulders, her back, her neck. Her hands were relaxed in her lap; now they're fists. He's not worried, not afraid, but he's tightening too, lowering his center of gravity, ready for her to go at herself or to come at him, because he already knew there was a better than average chance that she would. Why? Fuck knows. Everything he does now apparently has a better than average chance of causing her to attempt to do harm to him or herself or both.

"When?"

Her tone is very even. Very calm. That might or might not be a good thing.

"Soon as I finish gettin' our shit together."

"Can I bring the book?"

"Book's gone. You threw it over the edge."

"Oh," she murmurs. "Right."

And nothing else. Gradually she loosens again.

So he turns away and goes back to packing.

Not much else to pack. Some food - they'll have to travel light but they can forage. He knows quick ways north, which roads are impassable and should be avoided. He can ride for hours upon hours without stopping, without sleep. He'll tie her onto the goddamn bike if he has to.

There's a wonderful degree of freedom in no longer giving a fuck.

But he does give a fuck when he's crouched over his bed, stuffing clothes into his pack, and hot agony explodes into his injured shoulder. Yes, he does care about that.

At first he has no idea what it is. He just knows the pain and he snarls like a hurt animal, starts to whirl, snarls into a yell when a second explosion goes off, bright at the edges of his vision, warm wetness streaming down his back. He throws his weight backward and collides with something that exhales sharply and disappears, and when he finally does turn, arm swinging, she's there and sprawled on the floor, her bloody knife in her hand and her face flushed and twisted with rage, and he can't tell if everything is going gray because he's bleeding too much or if it's just the light itself, all the color gone out of the world, back into his dreams. Everything his dreams. This was all one big fucking lie of a dream.

He never got her back. Never even had the illusion of it. Not when it's all done.

Never will.

He lurches to his feet, looming over her and breathing hard, almost snorting like a bull. His arm is a bar of bright, singing agony, and he's having trouble lifting it, moving it at all; it took the brunt of her stabs and maybe she ripped something in it, probably she did, and she'll take out his other one if she can. He can see it in her wild, mad eyes. She'll take _him_ out.

He knew this moment was coming. That's something else he knew. And he ran out of time, they didn't get out fast enough, so here it is.

"You're leavin' me," she breathes, shoving herself backward on her hands, knuckles white as she grips the knife's handle, lifts it. "You fucker, you're _leavin' me. You said you wouldn't._ "

"Ain't. I ain't leavin'." Jaw clenched, blood hot on his back, feeling his one good hand hooking into claws, and as he advances on her he can see it, the back of her head exploding, and he tastes her blood on his lips. "You're comin' with me."

"I _can't_. We can't. We can't leave." She makes it to her feet, still backing up, but her eyes are cold blue fire and utterly devoid of fear. "This is the only place we can be."

Thunder. Rumble, then a crack that rips the air apart and light spikes out of the sky, and she lunges just as he does, blade like a shard of lightning as it slices through the air and toward him, and as he collides with her and hurls her back at the same time as he drags her against him, she slashes at his throat and he turns it aside and catches it in his shoulder again, his upper arm, grunts and feels the blade hit bone; she's cutting him to pieces, blood dripping from his fingers, spattering the couch and the glass top of the coffee table as he jerks them around and his arm whips loose through the air. He has her wrist, wrenching and feeling the bones grind, crunch, and her agonized howl means absolutely nothing to him as the knife tumbles from her fingers and clatters across the floor. She barely seems to notice; she's clawing at his cheeks, his eyes, screeching like a cat - that he's leaving her, that he always would, he always _does,_ that she hates him, she'll _kill_ him, and his mind hacks it all into a blur of awful fragments as he twists her arm and throws her what seems like halfway across the room.

He knew he would have to break her. In the end. He was just wrong about how. And why.

 _Fuck you,_ she's screaming, thrashing, rolling onto her hands and knees and trying to shove herself to her feet. _Fuck you, you're leavin' me, you fuckin' bastard, you lying fuckin' bastard, you son of a bitch, you're leavin'._ Hurtling toward the knife, ignoring a wrist that he very possibly just snapped, hand extended for it with her teeth gleaming in another lightning-strike, and he gets to it before she does and kicks it away, spinning it toward the fireplace and well out of her reach.

Blood everywhere. Her cunt was dripping it onto the stones, pumping it out of her when she fucked herself. He spilled it all over her belly and thighs and his hand when he came. She drank his and he drank hers when they fed on each other. It's all blood, always been blood, from the moment the bullet burst her head open and painted his lips with it to this moment now, when she's trying to bleed him dry and he'll take her apart to make her stop. He will. With certainty as dry and lifeless as the hardest desert, he knows he will.

But he can't. He can't give up. He can't, aching with it, hurting so much under his cold fury - he _can't,_ he has to _try,_ and he's reaching for her with his good hand as he comes for her, pleading.

"Beth, _stop._ "

" _Fuck you,_ " she hisses again, launches herself past him and toward the kitchen.

And he knows why.

The last of the part of him that resisted the dead ice is swallowed in that moment. He hid it as well as he could, but she found it anyway. Of course. Of _course._ How long has she known about it? How long did she let him believe she didn't? How long did she leave it there, waiting for this? She's insane but she's crafty, cunning - more perhaps _because_ of her madness - and he should have trusted her about as much as he would trust a snake. A viper. Something that will only strike and bite in the end, because it's simply their nature.

He follows her, ripping his way through the air like the knife itself, trailing blood with more of it stinging in his eyes, feet pounding the floor like the thunder, and as he charges into the pantry she's on her knees, the pack open in front of her and the gun in her hands.

She's turning on him. She doesn't make it. A wine bottle has magically appeared in his grip and it hits the back of her head with a weirdly musical thud, and she drops like she did then. Before. Drops like a sack of bricks.

She falls, and he watches her blood pool beneath her slightly curled fingers.

* * *

He can't carry her. So he drags her back into the main room. And at some point he turns and looks behind them at the long, stuttering, gently curving red smear they've left, his blood and hers together, and all he feels is tired.

We get warnings.

We only get so many.

* * *

Neither of them is bleeding in a way that appears to be life-threatening. Both of them are bleeding a lot.

Her wrist doesn't seem to actually be broken, at least not badly. Fractured, possibly. Sprained, definitely. Fresh bruises. He checks the back of her head. Her skull seems intact. He notes this with only the most distant interest and drops her onto the sofa, and as she continues to bleed onto its pristine pale fabric in a sluggish ooze, he goes back to the kitchen, retrieves the pack and brings it to her, removes the rope.

It's easy to tie her wrists and ankles, even with one good hand and his teeth. She's like a rag doll.

She's like she was when he lifted her and carried her down five fucking flights of stairs.

He wipes his bloody face and wraps his arm up as best he can. He can move it a little. Just a little. The blood is slowing and he's only moderately dizzy. He sits down in the chair opposite the couch and spreads the remaining doses of sedative out on the coffee table. The pills. The Xanax and Klonopin he picked up in town.

He dry-swallows three Xanax and goes back to his dull staring. At his chemical arsenal. At her, her head lolled back and her mouth slightly open. Outside, the clouds churn and the wind slams against the house. The rain sounds like hail. Could be it is.

There's enough sedative here to kill her. That's an option. There's nothing overwrought about it, nothing melodramatic; it's very practical. It would probably be painless. She might never regain consciousness at all. He could administer that final dose, that honey-colored sleep, and then for himself there's the gun.

It takes him a few minutes of numb meditation to realize that in that scenario, she turns. She _gets to._ That's how she would see it now. She gets to turn.

Well, _yeah._ She gets what she wants.

And there's also just the gun. Just that. Very simple; simpler than the drugs and just as painless. He picks it up and studies it; take care of her and then himself, the work of seconds, and then comes the revelation that he's sitting here across from the girl he would have done anything, _given_ anything to get back, and he's genuinely, calmly contemplating the various methods with which he could carry out an effective murder-suicide, and the fact doesn't hit him so much as wash smoothly over and through.

It follows. It just... It feels like he was always headed here.

It doesn't feel like murder-suicide. It doesn't feel that dramatic. It feels like putting a couple of hopelessly sick animals out of their misery. Intensely rational. Entirely merciful. Because he sure as fuck can't take her home now, and he sure as fuck can't go home without her. And he doesn't even know what _home_ is anymore. He never did.

Once, he thought maybe home was her.

He gets up. Walks over to her. He watches himself with dim fascination as he lifts the gun and presses its muzzle against the starburst scar on her forehead. Stays like that for a few moments.

Lowers it and goes back and sits again, and sets the gun down on the coffee table with the rest of his options.

He could, of course, do nothing at all.

That's the one he goes with. It seems easiest. And he's so, so tired.

* * *

It's beginning to get dark when she finally stirs.

He watches her, blank. In fact he's not sure if the darkness is due to the time or to thicker cloud. The rain has definitely turned to hail, not large pieces but relentless, rattling against the roof and windows. Monotonously deafening but faded sufficiently into the background to mostly slip free from his attention.

She stirs. Groans, turns her head against the bloodstained back of the sofa. Flutters her eyelids. It could very well be that he's damaged her already damaged brain even further.

Well. Sooner or later he'll know.

A little while longer. Then she lifts her head, groaning again and squeezing her closed eyelids, features twisting with pain. There's something intelligent about that expression, something _processing,_ and when at last she opens her eyes there's even sharper intelligence present in them. Clearer. She might be concussed, might have a plethora of other things very, very wrong with her, but she's still _here._ She's focused on him. She's focused on him like a bolt flying. He looks back at her, hunched, hands dangling between his knees-

And something in him is cracking open, seams appearing all over its surface and beginning to spread. Something reeking and rotten and awful is spilling out, pus-like. Infected and left to fester for a long, long time.

"Like _I'm_ the one leavin' _you,_ " he whispers. "That's fuckin' hilarious. You know that?"

She blinks. Gives no other sign that she heard him at all. It doesn't matter. He doesn't care about a reaction. Doesn't give a fuck, not even remotely. He has no more of them left to give. He's just _talking,_ low and sharp and harsh, syllables like bullets between his clenched teeth, and he's aware of a cold, swelling rage rising from somewhere in his gut, a place he had no idea was even there. Smeared with that pus, stinking, _seething_.

"You holdin' some kinda grudge? You punishin' me for somethin'? Is that what this is?" Jaw clenched tighter, his teeth grinding. "I tried. I fuckin' _tried,_ don't you dare tell me I didn't fuckin' try. I ran all _night_ for you. All night. Ain't my fault. It-"

She's blinking again. Slowly, owl-like, her face impassive, but those _eyes..._ Just watching him, silent. Taking him in. He hates it, hates looking at it, her fucking face, how she doesn't even _care,_ how _she_ did this, and he hates _her,_ and his lips peel back in something between a snarl and a sneer.

"Don't you fuckin' look at me like that."

Nothing. That hard, flat gaze. Like how for a while she was going away, blanking out - seems like years ago now - except she hasn't gone anywhere, and she understands everything he's saying to her. Every goddamn fucking thing, every spiteful, poisoned word.

He hauls himself to his feet, ignores the muffled shriek of his arm, stalks toward her. To the side. Back. Hectic pacing, glancing at her. One fist only.

"We had you. Y'know?" He releases a sound that isn't even close to a laugh. "We _had_ you. You were right there, and we coulda walked out. Him? The kid? Wasn't _worth_ it. You know what happened to him? Huh?" He stops, bends, inches from her face, and she tilts her head back and stares up at him as he hisses at her. "He didn't even fuckin' _live,_ Beth. He was walker chow. His place all torn up, family dead, then _he_ was dead, and you're gonna tell me you were worth his sorry ass? Kid wasn't good for _nothin'._ "

Now it _is_ a sneer, contempt roiling through the sick pit of his belly, and he doesn't even know who it's directed toward. Could be anyone. Anything. Everything. The whole fucking universe, which consists of this house and him and her, and the storm outside.

Another sharp, thin sound, the bones of laughter, because this is all so horrifically true and he's been waiting to say it for so fucking long. "Fuck, know what? You let him stay there, he'd probably still be _alive_ right now."

He's trying to hurt her. He doesn't care if she's hurt, but he's also _trying_ to hurt her, and he's back in the shack with her, her looking at him like that as he shouted every abusive thing he could think of at her, trying to make her cry, trying to _hit_ her with his words if not with his fists, and she refused to be beaten back and it only threw him into new and hysterical heights of rage.

He shoves away from her, turns, walks a few steps, stops, and there's the needles and the drugs and the gun on the table, thrown into hard relief as lightning stabs into the shoulders of the world and makes it bleed rain.

He could do it. He could end this. He still can.

He whirls, snarling again, pain singing in his head and nausea shaking him, and he's so fucking angry, he could kill her, fucking _kill_ her, because there was no point to any of this, _none_ , it was all for nothing, and he should have crawled into that car with her and curled around her and stayed, and he should have put a knife through her skull just to make sure.

"I tried, and we _had_ you. All you had to do was stay." _All you had to do. All I had to do. Grab you, pull you back, and I didn't. I didn't. I knew it was wrong, it was all going wrong, and I could have stopped it, and I didn't._ "What the _fuck_ was that? _Scissors?_ Are you fuckin' kiddin' me? What the _fuck_ were you thinkin'? You _lookin'_ to get yourself killed? Good job, right? Great fuckin' plan."

Her face, her beautiful scarred face, tipped up to his, and he _lunges_ at her, centimeters away from her, body following directives of its own, all sourced from that infected wound and all just as mad as she is. He doesn't remember what it feels like to be sane, and now he never will.

"All you had to do was _stay,_ just stay there and keep your fuckin' mouth _shut,_ you _stupid fuckin' BITCH._ "

The world slows. Stops. Grays out. Falls utterly silent. It's him and it's her, and he's towering over her, bent as if he's going to kiss her, teeth bared like he means to bite her lips off, fist pulled back and ready to smash into her face.

He can feel the crunch of her cheekbone shattering. For a split second of that endless frozen moment, he's sure he's done it.

But when everything winds back into motion she's just sitting there, and his fist is still raised, teeth still bared, lightning crashing outside and nearly constant, her skin brilliant and bone white and her eyes shining.

Shining. Overflowing, trickling down that cheek he meant to break.

He crumples. Steps back, almost falls, shakes his head, shakes everything. He feels a sting like a hundred needles in his scalp and realizes he's raked his hand into his hair and he's pulling at it, yanking, releasing it and stumbling again and whimpering before her, and she's still _staring_ at him, crying silently, and he made her do it, made her cry, _again, hurt_ her, and it's all he can do and all he ever does.

He was never going to save her. He can't save anyone.

 _We don't get to save people anymore._

 _I'm sorry,_ he almost whispers, but the words don't come. Nothing comes. He's standing there, left arm hanging useless and his other trembling so hard it might as well be, and it's taking all his last reserves of self control to keep from doubling over, retching, vomiting bile onto the floor.

 _I'm sorry,_ and _he's_ useless, he's worthless, everything he touches turns to shit and falls to ruin and everything he tries to do goes down in flames, and _I'm sorry,_ but the worst part is that he's not sure he is.

Not sure he wants to take any of it back.

He closes his eyes. He doesn't know how long. He closes his eyes and he breathes, and gradually the nausea eases, though it doesn't vanish. Gradually the room finds that stillness again, beneath the all-pervasive thrum of the hail, and he stops shaking. His blood cools, slows, begins to form the intricate crystals into which it cast itself hours ago. The rage is a distant wind. It's as useless as he is. There's no point in that either. No point in feeling it, no point in expending the energy.

Might as well let it all go.

He opens his eyes and she's still crying, tears dripping from her chin, her nose, wetting her lips, and her clear gaze is locked on him and it doesn't waver. Not once.

So he goes to her.

He crouches. He lifts his hand, frames the side of her face, pulls her in and tugs her down to meet him, and with exquisite care he wipes her tears away with his thumb, kisses the tracks they've made, kisses her mouth. Traces those scars, each one. Soft. He has to be soft now. He has to be gentle with her.

She's shivering. Hardly at all, but she is; the slightest vibration under her skin, in the core of her muscles. He cups her jaw with his palm and leans his forehead against hers, and he breathes.

She still smells like that soap. It's like water closing over his head.

No. Not the gun. Not the drugs. Not a knife. It could never be those things. It could only ever be one thing, and one thing alone. He carried her, in his first dream here. He carried her in his arms and even if he can't do that now, he still _will,_ somehow; he'll lift her and hold her and carry her one last time.

"We come outta this together," he murmurs, "or I will take us both over the edge. I will. Don't fuckin' think I won't. I got nothin' left to lose."

His knife is on his belt. He draws it and raises it, presses the edge of the blade to her wrist, and cuts the ropes. Does the same to her ankles.

Gets up.

He drops the knife at her feet. She's looking at him again - not crying anymore. He has no idea what he's seeing on her face, in her eyes. It doesn't matter.

It really doesn't.

"You're right," he says softly. "I'm dead. I died when you left me."

He walks away from her. He doesn't look back.


	11. let me off this boat

**Chapter 11: let me off this boat, I'm sick of this ride**

He tilts his head back, opens his mouth, and the rain tastes like copper.

Out on the deck, the world is breaking apart. The thunder cracks the mountains. The lightning doesn't stop, refuses to stop even for a second, and the wind screams around him, slams into him, grabs his clothes and his hair and yanks at him. Rakes hail-claws across his face, shoots him with tiny bullets. Trees rocking back and forth, whipped like they're buffeted by constant colliding shockwaves.

He stands there, hand against the railing, and he closes his eyes and lets it happen.

He won't go back in. He's done doing things. He's done trying.

He's making it simple. For himself, for her. Like holding her body in that hallway, feeling himself dying with her, knowing that there weren't any more questions to ask and nothing more to do. Nothing that mattered. She complicated his life so much, made him believe, made him want to have faith, _hope,_ that there were good people and not everyone had to die, that sometimes good things do happen. That it might be all right. That everything might still be all right.

She fucked him up, and then she was gone.

It was supposed to be over, then. Now he stands here and he knows he's started bleeding again, dripping black onto the deck and into the rain, and he was an idiot. It's never over. Things like this don't just _end._ They don't just let you go. Not until they've bled you dry. Not until they've taken everything.

He was ready to _give_ her everything.

He still is.

He grips the railing, grips it so hard his arm shakes, vibrates through him and into the one she's apparently destroyed. The lightning cuts down across the stone and strikes a tree below; suddenly it's all fire, plumes of flame that refuse to be killed by the torrent. It's beautiful, color scorching its way into a world robbed of everything but black and white and pitiless gray, and he watches it burn with fascination that shivers electric through his core.

They made a fire, him and her. Together. They made a fire and it was good, for the first time in such a long time he felt _good,_ and it was one of the last times too, and he had no idea. Should have, though.

She made him believe, yes; she made him stupid.

The fire burns. He stares at it until it's seared itself into his retinas, until when he looks away it's all he can see. He could go back inside after all, get her - assuming she hasn't used the knife on herself - and bring her out here and show her the fire, curl his good arm around her and watch it with her, and then he could do what he said he was going to do and take them both over the edge, because who the fuck is he kidding? They're not coming out of this together. They're not coming out of it at all.

He doesn't know why he's even still here.

 _Because you can't stop._

Him and her, over the edge - the last of her pretty things. Everything else down there: the shattered glass, the books, the deer - probably not much more than hide and bones now - and the things he brought her. Those pretty little things, special things that had no reason for existing but to be beautiful, that were supposed to bring her back to him.

He looks down at the cliff face, the trees, the rocks all lit in white strobe. The fire winking in and out. His vision is clearing, and beneath him - seething through the woods, along the road, up the slopes and among the rocks like an oncoming flood, pale and steady as an army of ghosts shedding strings of flesh and hair and skin: hundreds upon hundreds of walkers. Perhaps thousands. All coming for them. Coming up to them.

Coming to her.

Flicker-crack and they're gone. Then there again.

It doesn't matter if they're real or not. They're real enough. They're real in every way that counts.

He turns away, half slides and half falls down to sit on the soaked wood. He's drenched beyond the possibility of getting any wetter. He's in so much pain he can't even feel it anymore. He's lost everything, lost her, and only now does he finally understand.

He closes his eyes. He really should go. Deal with both of them. But he's waiting for something.

Fuck knows what it is.

* * *

 _Here, what it might be._

He gets up. He goes back inside. His knife is at her feet and she hasn't moved. She's sitting there and staring at nothing until she's staring at him, expression still unreadable, _there_ but in no way he has any hope of ever understanding. Nowhere he could ever find her.

He crouches by the coffee table and picks up a syringe, a bottle. Pierces the top, fills it, goes to her and pulls her close, and she doesn't struggle when he slides the needle into her neck. He holds her for a few seconds, and he's sure he feels her loosening, leaning against him, her breath easing.

He lays her back and he does it again. And again, until the last bottle is empty. And he sets the syringe down and sets _himself_ down, lies down next to her and buries his face in her hair, and it's like it should have been, like the car, like that mass of walkers coming up to greet them, and he waits with his hand against her chest, feeling the rhythm it contains slow and slow until he doesn't feel anything at all anymore.

He keeps holding her until he drifts away. Sleeps.

He wakes up to her teeth ripping into his throat. And that's fine.

* * *

 _Also it could be this._

He gets up. He goes back inside. His knife is at her feet and she hasn't moved. She's sitting there and staring at nothing until she's staring at him, expression still unreadable, _there_ but in no way he has any hope of ever understanding. Nowhere he could ever find her.

He bends and picks up the gun and goes to her, crouches and leans in, and she doesn't pull away when he presses his lips to the starburst scar on her brow. It's good that it's there - not that he needs a target. But this also feels right, like it's a place made and laid out for him, and he sets the muzzle of the gun against it and squeezes the trigger and paints the back of the sofa with her brain.

And he lowers himself to the floor, lays his head in her lap and the muzzle against his temple, and follows her.

* * *

 _And this is possible._

He gets up. He goes back inside. His knife is at her feet and she hasn't moved. She's sitting there and staring at nothing until she's staring at him, expression still unreadable, _there_ but in no way he has any hope of ever understanding. Nowhere he could ever find her.

He bends and picks up the knife and settles himself on the sofa beside her and presses her back so she's resting, so she's comfortable, and he cuts her throat in one smooth move, and with arterial spray there's a good bit more than a few drops of her blood on his mouth.

And then there's the gun.

* * *

 _Then, too, all of this._

He gets up. He goes back inside. His knife is at her feet and she hasn't moved. She's sitting there and staring at nothing until she's staring at him, expression still unreadable, _there_ but in no way he has any hope of ever understanding. Nowhere he could ever find her.

He falls on her. Rips her clothes off her, rips them to shreds. Shoves her back and holds her down and plunges into her and fucks her until she's screaming, until he is, fucks her cunt raw and bloody, fucks her and presents his neck to her and keeps fucking her as she tears his throat out with her teeth. Tears her throat out before she can, eats her alive. Jams the gun against her head, jams it into her mouth, squeezes the trigger. Gives it to her and she does it to him. The knife, slashing her open any number of ways, being slashed. Gutted. Needles. Falling asleep inside each other. Floating away on a sea of their mingling blood as the world shatters into red and black and the house burns to the fucking ground.

* * *

 _And._

Going to her. Finding the strength to move his arm, to use it, to lift her and hold her against him. To carry her out the front door into the rain and around and down to the edge, to kiss her so softly, so carefully, to hold her so tight as he takes them both into the air.

Maybe they fall.

Maybe they don't.

Maybe they fly away.

* * *

 _Curled in the strobing dark, screaming his throat into bloody cracks. Slamming his head against the wood, howling at the rain, doubling over and hugging himself even with his ruined arm, retching, dry-heaving. He would have done anything. He would have done anything to save her. He would have died for her a thousand times. She was everything, everything, and she was taken away from him and he would have endured any torture to get her back. If he could have suffered enough to make it happen, he would have. But he's suffering now and it's not doing anything, it's not fixing anything, it's not better, and she's suffering too and she isn't coming back, isn't ever coming back, that girl in there is a shell and always was, and now in his mind he's killing her over and over, killing them both, and he doesn't know when he got so fucking sick except maybe he became that way at the same moment the bullet burst her skull open, maybe that was what did it, broke him just like it broke her, and he can't come back either, they don't get to come back, both of them are too far gone and he did it, it's his fault, it's her fault, they're destroying each other, throwing each other over the edge again and again and again, and he can't make it stop, can't ever make it stop, can't work up the courage to do what he knows he has to do, the only thing left to do, he's a worthless fucking coward and when she was whole she deserved better and even now she deserves so much better than this. Than him._

 _This is not how it was supposed to be._

We'll try again tomorrow.

 _And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and it doesn't end. It doesn't ever end. Because they're dead. And this is Hell._

I'm sorry. _He is. He won't take it back, any of it, he meant every fucking word, but he is so, so sorry._ I'm sorry Beth I'm sorry I'm sorry I didn't want this, not like this, I didn't want it I swear I didn't mean to I didn't I didn't I swear, I didn't mean to do it, it wasn't supposed to be like this, it was supposed to be better.

It was supposed to be better now.

 _Anything. Anything to make it better, anything in the fucking world._ But all you had to do was stay. Stay there and keep your fucking mouth shut. _And I died when you left me._

I ain't leavin' you. I ain't never gonna do that.

 _This is the only place we can be._

You're safe, Beth. You're safe up here.

You're safe with me.

* * *

Hands. Soft, small and warm, on his face. In his hair. Cringing back, shrinking; pressing forward on his knees. Curling against it. Shaking. Hurting so much. He doesn't want to be alone anymore. If she has the knife, if she's going to find a way, it's still better than being alone.

Arms circling, enfolding him. She was always so strong. She pulls him close and it bursts his shoulder and arm into screeching pain but he doesn't care; he collapses against her, slumped with his head on her breast, clinging and sobbing and trembling everywhere. She's here and he doesn't care in what capacity, how much of her, what she's like, what she intends to do with him and with herself; he doesn't want to stop her. He's so tired.

He just wants it to be over.

She's rocking him. She's rocking him in her arms and whispering to him, lips against his temple, his torn cheek, his twisted mouth. He can't make out what she's saying but he doesn't need to. Her voice was always like music. It was always so sweet. It's sweet now. He can hear it, listen to it, drift in its flow while she kills him, and it's all right.

But she's not killing him.

She's just holding him, stroking his hair, and the pain is subsiding to a dull pounding. He's soaking wet and cold but she's warm and she's wrapping herself around him, somehow bigger than him now and somehow he's so small.

It's not raining anymore. It's not dark. Out across the peaks and ridges, the sun is lifting itself into a flushed sky. He blinks into the light.

And suddenly he understands what she's saying.

 _It's all right. I'm here. I'm here, Daryl. I'm not leavin' you. I'm not leavin' you again. I promise I'm not. I love you. I love you and I'm not gonna leave you._

 _You're safe now._

 _You're safe with me._


	12. watch the signs now

**Chapter 12: watch the signs now, you'll know what they mean**

She helps him inside.

He closes his eyes again, lets her lead him. Every step is misery. But it's all quiet, all distant, and he doesn't care. None of it matters anymore. There's only her and her arms and her warm side pressed against his, strong and supporting him, and every painful step he takes is because she's there with him.

And in every step she takes with him, he feels himself starting to return. He feels _there_.

He didn't know how far out he was. How close he came to not coming back at all.

The room is soaked in dawn light, and he squints into it, flutters his eyelids, closes them again when it becomes too much. He doesn't need to see. Not yet, anyway. And it's not that nothing is worth looking at. It isn't that at all.

It's that it's over.

* * *

Into the bathroom, he sinks down onto the toilet, slumped, head low between his shoulders and lip caught between his teeth, and it slips free in a thick whimper when she lifts his shirt off - careful, so careful, and he catches glimpses of her face and sees her intense concentration, her grimace when his whimper strains into a sharp whine. But he still doesn't care. It's his body operating automatically, responding to pain the way a body is supposed to respond.

He's quiet again as she strips off his clumsy, useless bandages and bends close, examining the wounds. He feels her breath on his skin.

She's so fucking alive he can't stand it.

She's moving. Sighing. There are a hundred things in that sigh and he can't figure out any of them. He winces and twitches when a sting lances into him and then she's swabbing his shoulder and arm with what feels like cotton, cotton and disinfectant. The sting flares, fades, flares again, and he clenches his teeth and keeps still and lets her do what she has to do. And it hurts again when she starts to re-bandage everything, all gauze and tape, but it also feels better. He didn't think the wounds were actually so deep - except for the one in his arm - or so wide. Apparently they aren't. Apparently it's not as bad as it seemed.

Maybe she wasn't really trying after all.

More stinging as she applies the disinfectant to the scratches on his face. Band-aids. It seems like nothing more is necessary.

And she lays her head on his uninjured shoulder and he shudders, finds her hand at his side, and it feels good to cry again for a while.

He's moving in a dream when he tugs her around in front of him and presses her into a crouch and examines her head more closely than he did before, parting her hair and peering at the gash in her scalp in the brightening light. It's clotted, not bleeding anymore and doesn't look like it has for a while, but he takes the cotton and the disinfectant from where she left them on the floor and he cleans it as best he can, with as much care as he can find, and she hisses and whimpers like he did but she holds still for him, and when his hands start shaking it's not unbearable. He wraps up her wrist, wraps it so it won't move too much, and somehow it really doesn't appear to be broken. It's not so bad, and when she gives him some painkillers and he takes them it's even better. Much better.

It's better now.

* * *

They don't say _I'm sorry._ They go back into the main room and he strips off the rest of his wet, bloody clothes and she strips off hers, and they lie down together. In her bed, not his. Hers is nearer the light.

They lie down together and press in close, and they sleep until late afternoon, until the sun is sinking toward setting. The house is quiet. The world is quiet. He doesn't dream. If she does, the dreams don't trouble her.

* * *

He wakes up facing her. She's lying on her side, knees drawn up under the covers and her arms tucked in against her chest, and she doesn't look pale and dead. She looks peaceful. She looks like she's sleeping.

He lifts a hand and reaches for her, combs her hair back from her face. Runs his thumb across the scar on her cheek. Curves his hand over the warm slope of her throat and feels her pulse beneath his fingers. She's naked and so is he, and she's so close to him, and it doesn't feel dangerous. It doesn't feel like something he has to fight anymore. It doesn't feel like he has to go to war with himself.

He doesn't have to do anything, except be here. That was all he ever had to do.

 _I love you._

He closes his eyes again and drifts away.

* * *

They wake up. Get up. Dress. In silence he goes to fetch cans for dinner and in silence she makes a fire and builds it up, and in silence they eat. And she _eats._ She does it slowly and almost as if she's surprised by the act and the process, as if it's new to her. He watches her and as far as surprise goes, he doesn't feel any. He still feels so tired, but it's a loose, eased kind of tired. The kind of tired that simply makes you want to sleep, sleep for hours, days. How sleep might make it better.

In silence they go back to bed and lie facing each other again, and his hand finds hers and their fingers interweave. Hers is warm and small and strong in his. He holds it and he watches her for a length of time he can't hope to measure, as she falls gradually down and down into a darkness that doesn't mean either of them any harm, that welcomes them.

So he follows her.

* * *

He wakes in the night, in the small hours. The moon is high and it's washing over her, but she looks too alive to be carved marble, her side rising and falling with her breath. He watches her sleep again, hand still clasping hers, and he mouths the words over and over with a strange kind of wonder.

 _I love you._

It's so simple and it took him so long.

* * *

Dawn again. Soft light - not the piercing, brutal thing he's gotten used to, like the sun itself intends to be gentle with them now. She's not on the deck. She's here beside him, still so deeply asleep. He's not afraid of her now and this feels right, so he pulls her against him, wraps his arms around her and holds her tight. It still hurts, low and burning, heated wire wrapped around his bones. But he can move the arm now, more than he could, and there's some muscle tension in it. He doesn't know what he did to it, what she did, how badly it's really injured, and he still doesn't care.

If he can hold her like this, it's enough.

* * *

Breakfast. They still haven't spoken to each other, not full-voice. Not even really a whisper. It has to be this way; he's not sure why and not certain how he knows but it does. They're returning to something, feeling their way back into something, and it can't be rushed.

They weren't too far gone. They get to come back.

But he doesn't know what happened.

He sits on the sofa, unperturbed by the wide smear of the bloodstain her wounded head left on its back, and watches as she moves along the bookshelves, fingers trailing the hard spines. She may or may not be looking for something, and in fact she doesn't end up selecting anything. She comes back to him and settles beside him, and then she presses close to him, fits herself against his side with her head on his good shoulder, and he angles himself toward her and curls his arm around her.

He doesn't know what happened. Whether he knocked something back into place in her. Screamed it back. Whether in the end he did give her some kind of beacon to follow. Whether she found her way back on her own. He doesn't know and he probably never will, and it's another thing that doesn't matter.

He looks out at the early afternoon sun on the ridges in the distance, and he feels her lips moving against the base of his neck, at last speaking, though so softly he barely hears her.

 _One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. Sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with the millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in someone's eyes._

She lifts her head and reaches up, frames his face with her hands. Her eyes are so clear. Not totally right, he notices. They wobble a little. There's a dazed quality to them. She's having trouble. But she's trying.

She's trying so hard.

"I don't want to be dead," she whispers.

 _My girl._

He lifts his hand and covers hers. Tips their foreheads together and takes a huge breath, pulling her in. "You aren't."

"I don't want you to be dead either."

"Oh, sweetheart." This time his breath is trembling, everything is, and he doesn't try to stop his tears, kisses the tracks of hers when she lets them flow. "I ain't gonna be. Not anymore."

* * *

It happened. They don't pretend it didn't. It all happened, and even if they aren't talking about it it's still there between them. All the rest of that day it's there. The day after, wherein they don't do very much but eat and sleep and be together. The damage she did to him. The way he hurt her. The bruises on her, the bandages, the same on him and the pain every time he moves. The things he thought about her. Almost did to her. He looks at her and wonders how much she knows. How he could ever ask her to forgive him.

But he did horrible things to her before, and she forgave him then. She forgave him without him having to say anything. He tried to show her instead, he tried to take care of her, to give her himself, he tried, and she knew.

He forgives her. It was never even a question. They both sinned against each other. They were lost together in the dark.

Possibly they had to be, to bring each other back.

* * *

He wakes up and she isn't there.

For a moment there's actually panic. He shoves himself up and scans wildly around, blinking in light far too bright for him to handle. The room comes into focus; she's not there. Not anywhere. Maybe upstairs, but... He turns over and looks toward the door out onto the deck and she isn't there either.

He lurches to his feet and stumbles to the stairs, up them, into bedroom after bedroom, calling her name. She isn't in any of them. Isn't anywhere.

Maybe he wasn't safe. Maybe neither of them were.

But he comes back down and there she is standing in the foyer, closed hand raised level with her waist.

"Beth." He wants to grab her, even with his bad arm, and shake her until her teeth rattle, because she can't do this to him, she can't frighten him like that, please, _please_ don't do that, not when he's still raw, not when he's barely scabbed over and losing her still feels like such a real possibility. So real that sometimes he wonders if he has. If this is a final cruel hallucination before the bullet crashes through his skull. Before they both go over. "Beth, don't you fuckin' _dare-_ "

She opens her hand and there's a flash of silver, and he stares. Gapes.

Nestled into the crease of her palm: Little bird in flight. In mid-song.

"I went down to the bottom," she says softly. "The rocks. All the things I..." She shakes her head. She doesn't want to say it. It's as clear as if she's told him. "I looked for them. All of them. This was all I could find."

He can't say anything. He can't breathe.

She reaches out with her other hand and takes his. "C'mon. Help me put it on."

* * *

Later she tells him: she took her knife. She didn't see any walkers.

He wonders - genuinely wonders - if they can't come up here anymore. If what's stopping them isn't the razor wire, or the rough terrain.

If something else is keeping them at bay.

* * *

She's still not okay. Of course she wouldn't be. She gets confused, especially in the days after, and he knows some of it is because of what he did, but not all. She gets headaches, bad ones. She goes away for those little moments. Sometimes for longer. She gets distant. She doesn't respond to him. Things are better but she's not healed. What's wrong with her, _broken_ in her - he can't heal that. He knows that now, and really he knew it before. He can't make her well, and it's possible that she never will be fully well again. It's possible that part of her is just gone, or fragmented enough that it might as well be. It's possible that he _won't_ ever get her back. Not the way he wanted. It's possible that he was wrong. It's possible that he has to change the way he thinks about it.

She's kneeling in front of the fireplace, a bunch of twigs in her hand for kindling, and she just... stops. She stares at them, face utterly blank, and by the time he sees her and gets to her she's dropped them and she's lifting her fingers to her mouth and he knows what she's going to do, knows it's not over. Not this part of it.

He reaches her, drops to his knees in front of her, takes her forearms in his hands and holds her as tight as he can but also as gently as he can. Firm, letting her fight him in that mechanical way she has, not letting her win. Calm. Murmuring to her.

 _It's alright. I got you. You don't have to do this. You can stop. I know you can, you will. I'm here. It's okay. Ain't gonna leave you._

And eventually she loosens, sags, drops against him, and he curls both arms around her, ignoring the pain, and holds her until she stops shaking.

 _You ain't dead._ Kissing the crown of her head, her hands, her healing wrists. _We ain't dead. We're here. I love you so much and we're here._

She's not healed. But it's better now.

* * *

And he's not well either.

He still has dreams. They're still bad. They still don't feel like dreams at all. Standing in that hallway as her skull explodes and she falls over and over again, and there's so much more blood, chunks of brain and bone, the back of her head a gaping horror. Standing over her as she lies in her bed or on the sofa, or sits and looks wordlessly up at him, and he has the needle, the knife, the gun, he's going to destroy her, he's going to kill her with his teeth, he's going to fuck her to death, he's going to eat her after. During. Whatever broke in him - broke _open_ in him - it hasn't left him, and he knows it might never go. He jerks awake sobbing, thrashing, sometimes screaming, and she's there and she has him, cradles him, sometimes presses him down and lies on top of him, anchoring him with her weight and the sheer physical _reality_ of her, until he's returned completely.

He didn't have to tell her to do these things. She just knew.

 _You're safe,_ she whispers. _You're safe, Daryl. I promise, you are._

 _I'm safe too._

* * *

Time was malleable before; it is now, but not disorienting to a sickening degree, not washing over him with vertigo. It just flows, smooth and easy, and he doesn't have to keep track of the days. There are long periods of nothing. There are long periods where they just sit together. There are long periods where they lie in bed, sometimes sleeping and sometimes not, sometimes talking but often silent. Sometimes they're wrapped up in each other and sometimes they're simply lying side by side, facing each other, facing away, on their backs gazing up at the shadows on the high ceiling. Turned toward the window and watching the sun move across the ridges and valleys. Watching the rain, if there's rain. Watching hawks wheel and dip and arc. Watching nothing at all.

At some point they go out together - he can't use the bow but they make do - and they hunt, track, take a couple of rabbits. Not much but it's meat, fresh, and on the way back they find a wild mulberry tree and gather as many as they can, fingers stained such a deep purple they're almost black. They eat almost as many as they can pile into his bandanna, painting their lips and tongues the same shade. He remembers a day, after the fire but before he lost her, when they found a mulberry tree and ate so many they were almost sick after, pulled them off the branches and then picked them off the ground, and lay side by side in the shade, and something about it felt so _right_ that he wanted to cry.

He asks her if she remembers. She frowns for a bit, and then she looks so sad and she shakes her head. And he kisses her stained fingertips and tells her it's all right.

He can remember for the both of them.

When they get back and sit outside, skin and clean the rabbits, he sees how she's looking at them. At the meat, at the blood. He sees that she's fighting with herself. Her lips are moving - almost imperceptibly - and he doesn't know what she's saying, not the exact words, but he knows she's telling herself the same thing he tells her. That she doesn't have to do it. That she's not dead.

He lets her fight. He's here if she needs him, but this is something she has to do for herself.

She wins. This time.

* * *

She doesn't win next time. Rabbits again, and he turns his back for a moment and when he turns back to her she's lost the battle, bloody and tearing into raw flesh. She's weeping with rage and frustration and shame when he cleans her up, washes her face and hands, and like he did with the mulberries he kisses her stained fingers and tells her it's all right.

She's not always going to win. All that matters is that she tries.

* * *

He tells her what he did.

He has to. He can't just leave it unspoken, because there's a chance she really doesn't know and he can't hide it from her even by omission. By the fire, that _fire,_ he tells her what he did to her, the way he touched her, and he can't look at her, tells her he knows it was so wrong, there's no excuse for it, he's so sorry. He could say he didn't mean to but it would be a lie. He's sorry, but that doesn't change anything. It happened.

It's part of him now.

She listens in silence and she's silent for a long time after. He waits. And then she takes his hand, and she still says nothing at all.

She never does. Not about that.

* * *

But she forgives him that too. He knows it, even if she never says it, because she shows him every day, just like he shows her he's sorry. Just like she shows him _she's_ sorry, and he shows her he could never do anything but forgive her everything.

Not forget. Never forget. Just like what he did to her when he bathed her, it's all part of them now, and they both have so many new scars, and not all of them are the kind you can see. And they shouldn't forget this. He moves through this strange new world with her and he knows it's something they should keep with them, because what it meant in the end was that they got to come back - or they're _coming back_ now, because they were almost out there too long and it's a long, long way home - and that there are good people and there are bad people and sometimes they're the same person. That _never_ is just another word for _until._

They won't forget. Whatever happens after this, he'll carry it with him, like the small, ruthless weight of a knife on his belt.

* * *

He still wants her.

He feels it. He feels it every second he's near her - an aching heat deep inside him, persistent, constantly burning. Once he heard about a place where there was a seam of anthracite that caught fire and just kept burning, burning for years underground. No one could put it out. It burned and little by little its heat deformed the landscape, buckled pavement, created sinkholes, vented steam and poisoned smoke. Eventually everyone in the town built over it had to leave. Houses were demolished. After a while there was hardly anything left but the fire.

That's not going happen to him. But the fire is still there. Still burning.

He doesn't think he's going to be able to make it stop.

But that might be okay. Because it's still not a fight. He's still not at war. He can be near her - he can lie in bed all entangled with her, he can settle himself against her back and curl an arm around her waist and bury his face in the sweet smell of her hair, and it's not a battle he has to win to prevent disaster. Maybe she still wants him too - if she really did - and maybe she doesn't. Maybe someday something will happen there and maybe it won't. In any case it isn't time yet. If it ever does happen, it won't be time for a while. Maybe a very long while. Because that part of him - of _them_ \- was hurt, almost hurt too much, and it needs to be left alone until it's well.

And there's no way of knowing how long that might take.

In the meantime he can hold her. He can be held. He can feel how real she is against him, how warm, how alive. He can feel her heart under his palm, feel her chest rise and fall, and he knows this would and will be enough for him forever. More than enough.

 _I love you._ They whisper it over and over, as if they're trying it out between them, as if they're learning how. And he might be. He doesn't remember when he last said it to anyone. Even if he's felt it so many times since the world ended.

Not loving enough has never been his problem. Nor has it ever been hers. So that works out pretty well.

 _I love you._

Tracing every one of her scars over and over, so soft and so careful, adoring them. Adoring her. He's taken his shirt off in front of her before but now, even if it hurts so much, even if it terrifies him and clenches his gut and heart into fists of ice, he allows her to touch him. He lies in bed with her and breathes away his trembling as she follows those cruel lines with her fingers, as she learns them, maps them, as she kisses every single one.

And after some time passes, he's not afraid anymore.

* * *

And one night she's sitting by the fire, the last of it burning low and gilding her face and hair and hands, and he's been sitting with her, and just as he's getting up to move in the general direction of bed, she begins to sing.

It's not a song he recognizes. It's not really a song at all, in the sense he thinks most people would mean. There aren't any words to speak of. What she's singing might become a song someday but right now it's flowing and formless, lovely and very strange. It rises dreamily and drifts through the shadows near the ceiling, and then it falls, slips into something gentle and low and sad, sharpens for a few seconds into something desperate and almost angry, and curls up with a burst of sparks to rise again and level out, all smooth curves, unfurling to spread over them like a canopy.

It's these days. He's listening to these days. She took all this unmeasured time, took it into herself, and she made music of it.

He was kneeling. Now he lowers himself, lays his head in her lap and he listens to her as she strokes his face.

He might not ever get her back. Not the way he wanted.

But maybe this way is better.

* * *

They get to come back. They are. Here, now. Trying again tomorrow, trying every day, every hour, every minute, every second. Coming back. Leaning their foreheads together in the gentle dark, her arms around him, his hands tangled in her hair. Her voice, his. _I love you. I love you. I love you._

 _You're safe with me._


	13. epilogue

**Chapter 13: epilogue**

They both know when it's time to leave.

As with so many other things, they don't have to discuss it. They don't have to say anything at all. And he doesn't know how long it's been. It's like it was after the moonshine and the shack and the fire; there are days but he doesn't count them. He never knew how long it was. _A while._ It doesn't matter how long. What he knows is that he's not healed but he's healing and he's healing well; he can move the arm, he can grip, he can use it well enough for the basic things he has to do. The crossbow is too difficult, but when he realized that was going to be a problem for him, he began to teach her again. Afternoons outside, target practice, watching her learn her stance and how to cock, load, aim, shoot, hold her body straight and graceful as the bolt as she follows through. He watched her learn - really with very little need for him to directly instruct her - and he thought she was the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.

She always is.

She has the bow. He has the gun. It'll work for now.

That night, in silence like so many evenings now, they pack. Clothes, food, first aid, some of the things he brought from town. He found her another bag of M&Ms. Cranberry sauce with the ribs from the can. The hairbrush and the elastic ties, because her hair is longer every day and soon she'll be able to braid it again. Short, but even so.

But ultimately all these things are incidental. They have everything they need.

Going to bed with her, she forgoes clothes and he does too, and he doesn't puzzle over the reason. Like the first time they lay down together after the storm, really _together,_ naked and wrapped up in each other, and nothing is going to happen and that's all right, because that's not why they're doing it. That's not the point. He's hard, trapped against her belly, but it doesn't matter. What matters is all that blood flowing under her skin, pumped by a muscle running strong and steady, and what matters is the way her chest expands and contracts as she breathes. What matters is that she's alive and he's alive, neither of them is dead, and they're going to _feel it_ with nothing between them.

He doesn't really sleep. Neither does she. But neither of them feels tired in the morning.

At dawn they get up, dress, and she walks out onto the deck and waits for him. There are things he has to get, things he has to gather, and he does and he brings them out to her, held in a bloodstained towel.

Syringes. Bottles of sedative. Bottles of pills. Restraints. The rope.

She takes one end of the towel and he takes the other and they throw it over the railing, over the edge in one smooth motion, and they lean over together and watch the red and white and the dawn-glitter as his arsenal tumbles down, watch it until there's nothing to be seen. Not even a sound from below as the things land.

It's like it all simply ceased to exist.

They wait a few moments longer. Then they turn and she takes his hand, he takes hers, and they walk away.

And they don't look back.

* * *

Down and out through the town, the walkers quiet in their pen, and descending out of the foothills into lower countryside. Long roads in fair weather, clear of the dead. Sunshine. Breeze. Even the rain is gentle. She sits behind him on the bike, arms wrapped around him and her head against his shoulder, and she watches the world fly past them all green and gold and blue. Except that's not what it is. _They're_ flying. Both of them. They went over the edge and into the air, together, and they didn't fall.

They still might die. Probably they will. But they still won't fall.

* * *

"You scared?"

She doesn't hesitate. She nods. He glances at her and he thinks the gate probably seems very big to her, very tall; it does to him. It did then and it does now. He didn't think it was home the first time it opened, and the truth is that he still doesn't think so. They call it a _safe zone_ and it's not. He suspects all of them know that. But he also understands what brings people to the point of telling that lie. Of wanting to be told.

Anyway, it's not always a lie. Not really.

"Me too," he murmurs. He is. He doesn't belong here. He never has and he never will, and he doesn't think she does either. Maybe once she would have, but that was before, and a lot of things have changed, and just because they get to come back, that doesn't mean this is what they get to come back to. This is not home.

He already has a home. She's standing right next to him. And he believes - he does, he has all the faith in the world - that the same is true for her.

"It's alright," she says softly, and she takes his hand and interweaves their fingers. "We're here."

 _We're safe._

They get back on the bike. The gate is opening. Already they can hear voices behind the wall, tense and excited. This isn't going to be easy. But it's going to be done. They'll find a way.

"Ready?"

Once again, she doesn't hesitate. She nods, and he knows.

"Alright. Hold on."

 _Girl, please hold onto me._

They go through the gate. They don't look back.

 _the end_


	14. afterword

**afterword (may good hope walk with you through everything)**

So.

The first thing I should tell you is that this story wasn't supposed to be _nearly_ this long. When I first had the idea - directly drawn from Bjork's song "Hyperballad" - I thought it might be around 12k words, the length of a shortish novelette. Then I thought it might be around 20k words, the length of a shortish novella. Instead we have something the length of a shortish novel, and I suppose that, given my track record with _I'll Be Yours For a Song,_ I really shouldn't be all that surprised when I vastly underestimate the length of my own stuff.

This got long because it _needed_ to be long, because I wasn't very far in before I realized it had to be much longer than I originally envisioned if I was going to do justice to the subject matter - to the characters, to the themes, to what was actually going on. Because what was going on turned out to be rather complicated.

The story I initially wanted to tell - which in a lot of ways has remained the core and the foundation - was in significant part a response to a lot of the Daryl-helps-Beth-find-herself-again scenarios that have been flying around. There are elements of that idea that I like and there are elements of it that I'm not so fond of, but one of the issues I have with it was articulated only after I started writing, which is that an underlying assumption of a number of rough versions of it doesn't really account for the fact that _Daryl is not okay._

Because Daryl is not okay. Finding Beth is probably not going to magically fix him. It shouldn't, anyway, if the story is going to be a true one. The idea that all he needs is her, that if she reappears he'll revert back into the Daryl we last saw in Alone - that's very romantic, it's very sweet, and I've written roughly that very thing more than once, but I don't think it's gonna happen.

I don't think it _should_ happen.

So here Beth is discovered alive, and she's this level of damaged - so damaged that Daryl eventually wonders if she might not be better off dead after all. And _Daryl_ is damaged. He's clinging to a vastly unrealistic idea of how things might happen - he's clinging to that exact scenario. That she's lost and he can guide her home.

And instead he gets lost in the darkness too.

I didn't want to trash that romantic scenario. I didn't want to dismiss it. But I did want to write a response, a kind of Yeah But What About This, that took something almost always conceived as bright and hopeful and joyful in the fandom - Beth's survival and return - and turned it on its head, inverted it, made it into something relentlessly horrible. Something as dark as reasonably possible, while still attempting to remain true to the story and the characters.

And the characters startled me a bit, in particular Daryl.

One thing that surprised me was how _angry_ he was at Beth - which is something I don't think I've seen addressed very much. That he's grief-stricken, that he's devastated, that he's gutted, absolutely. That his world has been shattered, sure. But that he's _absolutely furious_ with her? Not so much.

And you know, I kinda think he would be.

Because think about it. He lost her, and he lost her in the most senseless, stupid way, and there were so many things that went wrong in those thirty seconds, so many horrible decisions and mistakes, and yes, I do believe he would blame himself _forever_ for failing to pull her back when she went for Dawn, but I think he would also blame _her._ He might hate that he's doing it, he might not even _know_ that he's doing it, but I think he would. Because what she did - assuming nothing else was going on there - was stupid. Let's jettison our issues with the writing for a moment and treat it as something that _really happened in canon_ \- because it _did_ \- and it was so, so stupid and it made no sense at all. At least to him.

Just as one way to come at it: for those of us who have lost people we care about to suicide, I think that kind of anger is totally understandable. You're grieving for this person, you miss them so much, you have to face a world without them - and you're also _so_ pissed off at them, because they _left you._ They did that. They made that decision. It doesn't matter how unfair it might be to feel that way - and hell, maybe it's _completely_ fair. Regardless. You're angry.

Daryl is so fucking angry at Beth, and he doesn't even know it. Until he does.

I realized about halfway through writing that scene that he was almost speaking for the some members of the fandom there, and a number of you seem to have felt the same. "Catharsis" is the word I've seen flying around. It definitely felt that way for me.

And then there's the sex.

I imagined this would have an M rating - mostly for violence - and that sexual content would be kept at a minimum if it appeared at all. Then the masturbation scene slithered into my head, and it felt not only appropriate but _necessary_ \- a direction in which the story had to go if I was going to explore any of Daryl's deeper and more hidden feelings for Beth in that sense. It was twisted, horrific, surreal and vivid - like a nightmare so intense you're certain upon waking that it was true.

(And in fact if you were uncertain about whether or not it really happened, or how much of it actually did happen if any, you were meant to be. A lot of the more hallucinatory stuff that happens here is intended to be ambiguous. _Did that happen?_ Don't ask me, man. I genuinely don't always know. And it may not matter.)

I almost always write Daryl as being so sexually inexperienced that he doesn't know how to interpret his own feelings, and may in fact not always recognize them as such. My headcanon is that he's not technically a virgin, but has absolutely no real understanding of his own sexuality. This shows up a lot in fic, obviously, in significant part because it's heavily supported by canon. Daryl discovering sex with Beth - in a loving, safe, and joyful way - is wonderful to write, and it's one of the things I most love about the ship. I mean, clearly; easily 70% of _I'll Be Yours For a Song_ is devoted to that.

But.

Take Daryl - sexually inexperienced, and not well-equipped to handle feelings and desires he doesn't fully understand. Throw in extreme levels of mental and emotional trauma centered around this girl, and months of profound depression following what he believed was her death. Throw in the additional trauma of finding her alive and in the state she is. Take him and her and isolate them completely, make him her caregiver and then intensify that into him taking on almost the role of a parent. Have him infantilize her to an alarming degree; he always saw her as an adult before but now he sees her as a _child,_ a child he has to care for - and control. _Then,_ after you've done all of those things, put him in situation after situation in which his latent sexual desire for her begins to bubble to the surface.

There is no. fucking. _way_ that is going to go well. There is no way that's going to be healthy. This unexplored, extremely immature, extremely _powerful_ part of his psyche is waking up, and from the word go it's poisoned and mutilated. And as he becomes more and more unstable, that part gets sicker and sicker and sicker.

Until he's dreaming about himself violating Beth's body in more than one way, and literally consuming her. Until he arguably sexually assaults her by fondling her when she's in no position to consent to anything and _he knows it._

And that's when I realized I was almost writing a Yeah But What About This response to the ship itself.

I love Beth and Daryl as a romantic ship. I fucking love it. It's been years since a fictional canon relationship grabbed me this way. It makes me so happy, I adore writing it, and I clearly think the characterization of it by some as unhealthy and gross and predatory is total and utter bullshit. I'll defend the age difference to my last breath. I _like_ the age difference. I won't pretend otherwise. I think it's interesting because of who these two people are, I think it's a fabulous wrinkle in their dynamic, and I _like it._

But.

In here, I wrote their relationship in such a way that it almost became what those people say it is. It became deeply unhealthy. It became _predatory._ The age difference suddenly mattered, and not in a good way.

At one point I mentioned on my Tumblr that to amuse myself I had snuck a teensy weensy very obscure book reference into this thing. No one caught it - as far as I know - and I didn't expect anyone to. It was in chapter five, when Daryl notices that Beth appears to have skinned her knee at some point in the recent past, and it's a nod to _Lolita._

This is why, at the end, no sexual relationship proceeds from that point. It can't. That part of him - and her - has become too toxic. As Daryl decides, it needs time to heal, and it might take a very long time. It might never fully heal at all. Regardless, they can't do it now. Not healthily. Not safely.

(Did they? Eventually? I think so. But that part isn't my story. My story is over.)

And that's the nature of the ending as a whole - open, uncertain, but hopeful. When I started this people wanted to know if it would end happily, and as usual I was an asshole and refused to say, even though I knew the ending would fall on a high note, or at least a much higher note than where it started.

One of the reasons why I both play very coy about endings _and_ drop an obnoxious number of hints is that I get a lot of enjoyment out of watching readers try to guess what's going to happen. It's fascinating to get a look at how people are interpreting the flow and logic of the story, and a lot of that is because often those interpretations are different from mine, and I love that. I love seeing my own stuff from a different angle. Here, it was very, very interesting to see how many people predicted an ending that involved one or both characters dying. It was interesting, on this trip into Hell, to see how many people didn't interpret it as a journey down _in order to come back up._

Because that's the thing - and if I ever write anything like this again you may take this as precedent for how I operate: I don't believe in hopeless endings. I don't believe in endings mired in despair. Not in my stories, anyway. I think there's a place for those, and in fact I enjoy many of them a lot; as I said, Lars von Trier's film _Antichrist_ ended up influencing this thing incredibly much (right down to borrowing directly from it for the scene where Beth attacks Daryl and accuses him of leaving her) and that film ends on about the darkest note you can imagine. And right now a lot of my original writing is horror/dark fiction. I like writing the dark. I like writing about horrible things.

But I don't like writing cruelty purely for the sake of cruelty. And I don't like writing stories that end in total darkness.

I also don't like endings that tie everything up in a neat bow, where everything is perfect and everything works out and everyone is completely happy. For the most part, stories that end that way can't be true stories. But endings where things might be sort of all right, where there's a little bit of light even in the worst kind of darkness... Those are true endings, because I think most of the time that's how life is.

And I really do believe that at the final end of every story, of all of them, at The End of The Story, love wins.

More than once I've said that _Safe Up Here With You_ is in many ways the dark mirror of _I'll Be Yours For a Song._ There's discovery, revelation, spiritual sickness, a long internal journey. And there's healing, and that healing happens first and foremost because of love.

It doesn't fix everything - love never does - but it does heal. And ultimately, after everything, this is the reunion of two people who love each other.

So there's that.

If you read this all the way to the end - the story and also this pretentious fucking essay of an afterword - thank you so much. It's always mildly surprising to me when people read anything I write, much less care about it, and I know this has been a particularly rough ride. I hope it ended in a place you're happy with. I hope I did my job and did this story justice. And I hope this isn't the last journey we take together.

-S

6/24/15 - 8/6/15


End file.
